An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

I’m surrounded by idiots.

I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.

Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!

While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.

To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.

He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.

This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.

It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.

This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.

The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.

What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.

No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.

Asdfajsdfk.

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)

Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.

Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common

Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.

Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?

Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?

Him: I don't know

Me: then I am not interested

So this guy is supposed to do the frontend.
I do the backend.
I offer an endpoint.
He does his HTML+CSS magic.
Me: Cool but data is hardcoded. Could you get the data from the endpoint I sent you?
Him: "I'd prefer you do that, I can make a git repo so you download the front."

... So you don't do frontend, you just write pretty layouts. And I have to actually write the frontend logic? Go f yourself.

*attempting to flirt at the bar*
Hey! I'm a full stack developer, so I can do your frontend and your backend

I know a guy who writes everything in Haskell.

He started learning it because his parents got him into a math school (and math schools in Russia use either Python or Haskell), he liked it, but later he dropped out. Today, apart from Haskell, he only really knows HTML and CSS, and maybe some JavaScript.

He writes backend AND frontend in Haskell and uses some kind of JRPC stuff to manage all that. He told me that his life is a pure heaven. He IS RELEVANT (!!!!!!), his apps always run without bugs (because in Haskell you can mathematically prove that there are no bugs), they are performant, faster than C (because you can't write a complex enough app in C that will be as efficient as compiled Haskell, because it's you vs compiler). He doesn't have any problems in life whatsoever. He never got burned out, he never got anxiety or depression. He doesn't act pretentiously and stuff, he's just a normal person who rarely even mentions that he can program.

Science says it can't be done! You can't only know Haskell and be a relevant software engineer! You know what, he didn't _know_ it was impossible. He's like that grandpa from a meme, he got Alzheimers, but because of it he forgot that he had Alzheimers, and now remembers everything.

The fun thing is that he looks like a typical gopnik, with adidas suits and stuff.

What a gem of a person.

Manager: I want the front ends to be more dumb, too much logic is happening on the frontend.

Me: both of the sites are just multi step forms, I’m confused about the complexity part.

Manager: yea but don’t we have a bunch of third party api calls?

Me: we have 4 and they are public facing apis.

Manager: yea, make a new api and move this api calls to the backend and I want both frontend teams to send the same shape payload.

Me: but…

Manager: oh and I don’t like how the business team does the a/b testing and splitting traffic, let’s move that to the backend as well.

Me: but… that a/b testing platform they use in ran by another team and they have a full set of features for business analytics…

Manager: yea let’s just replicate those features and move them to the backend.

Me: but it’s a product!

Manager: look! You are the best backend engineer we got! I know you can do this!

Me: I lead the frontend teams…

Manager: ….

Manger: good news we are giving you a promotion with raise you are now a senior engineer.

Me: I confused but happy… I think..

While writing up this quarter's performance review, I re-read last quarter's goals, and found one my boss edited and added a minimum to: "Release more features that customers want and enjoy using, prioritized by product; minimum 4 product feature/bug tickets this quarter."

... they then proceeded to give me, not four+ product tickets, but: three security tickets (two of which are big projects), a frontend ticket that should have been assigned to the designer, and a slow query performance ticket -- on top of my existing security tickets from Q3.

How the fuck was I supposed to meet this requirement if I wasn't given any product tickets? What, finish the monster tickets in a week instead of a month or more each and beg for new product tickets from the product manager who refuses to even talk to me?

Fuck these people, seriously.

Frontend dev: Hey, could you break HTTP conventions and change the API so I don't have to manage the context of the request?

!rant, but kinda

My new director wants to buy a solution for a portal environment that my institution currently has. I have no qualms over it. My only issue was the company that sells it to be known to provide close to 0 fucking support when shit arises.

During a presentation we were told that they were using state of the art JAVA technology to render items on the page and that their ApI was easy for devs to grasp. This caught my attention since I know of very few and obscure Java frameworks that work with frontend tech (as in, your frontend logic is legit in Java)

The sales people proceed to show us React. Obviously thinking that no one knows what REact was. The dude continues with "This is new Java tech" all proud and shit prompting me to interject that it is "Javascript" the dude brushes it away saying "same thing" to which I reply with "Negative, please make sure that you properly discern Java from Javascript since Java is to Javascript as car is to carpet, completely different environments" the dude sarcastically says that "oh well, didn't know one of the people here was more aware of our own technology than we are" to which I say "and not only that, but the final say in us adopting your tech is mine, so I would rather you keep the sarcasm and the attitude to yourself, bring in a tech person if need be and learn these distinctions since we don't work with Java"

My new director later on went to talk to me since he apparently thought that Java and JS were related in some way. I can't really fault it, last time the dude touched programming was in the early 2000s, previous boss was a C and COBOL developer, but the previous dude would ALWAYS take my word no questions ask, this dude was there asking me if I was sure that Javascript and Java were really completely different environments asking me to show him.

I do not like to be questioned. I shoot the shit here and don't really involve myself with more technical aspects under this platform unless it involves concrete architecture discussions and even there I really don't care with engaging on a forum concerning that. But concerning my job I really.......really do not like to be questioned by people that know way the fuck less than me. I started coding when I was 17, I am 30 now, with a degree and years of experience. I really hate to be questioned by this dude.

My coworker became super restless and incompetent during the initial 2020 Covid lockdown. Like playing hours of video games during work hours restless.

For one project, my coworker was working on the backend and I was working frontend. Coworker also wanted to be overlord of the epic branch.

My coworker merges the epic to our test branch and our code is broken. Coworker didn’t pull my FE changes before merging. Dude, I shouldn’t have needed to tell you to pull. You changed the api response that your BE code delivers so of course I had to update my FE code so it could work with this change.

I had to resolve the conflicts because coworker left work early to “rescue/pickup” their girlfriend from work.

You bet I leave this person on read when they try to text me on Signal

What does a hungry frontend developer think about?

The burger menu.

Question for those that switched from Web, Mobile Apps development, Full-stack development to Game development after a year or more:
- Do you regret the change?
- What Game engine do you use?
- What Programming language do you use?

I love old school design. 1990's and 2000's website has their charm.

Negative side of this: I want to be frontend dev and I can only design these, so I can't make modern website without proper designer

Frontend and backend.

how infuriating is it when you (very much not a frontend dev) have to do "tweaks" to the UI

I HATE being a fullstack dev. I am responsible for everything. Its so exhausting because you cant focus on one thing.

Or its just me not being able to organize things....

Stopped studying DSA and for coding interviews, they legit rejected me even tho I did all questions right. Wtf is wrong with hiring.

I remember this another bastard asked me only DSA for a frontend job. :) he didn't ask me to give an intro even a straightaway question.

100 dollars to rebuild the whole frontend of their startup. what sort of humans run these Nigerian companies ? smh

I gave backend dev my frontend code and he had no idea about SCSS.

So he copied the compiled AND minified CSS, prettified/formatted it and put his own changes by searching the class names.

And he had made lots of design changes arbitrarily so when new changes were to be made I had to cope with it.

As a hack I kept his css as it is and compiled another file with new changes. And now there's two css files all huge, like 800kb multiply by two huge.

It covers about 33+ custom pages with all the bells and whistles.

#let me do the frontend
#I wont bother you either

My company boss wants to reorganise the team structures drastically.

Currently we have different teams for each product. And in that team we have a lead, frontend and backend developers working in sync.

The boss wants to split the teams not based on product.. but based on technology / frontend backend. Then assign the members to products based on demand.

Not sure how that is gonna turn out..

Job post I saw today. They are either looking for:

- C/C# Dev to the company
- HAPPY Frontend dev
- Java Dev to the company

Well now.. only the front end gets to be happy but doesn't know where to work while the other two can be grumpy and know they'll work at the company? 🤔

So the company that asked me to join them for work in a somewhat illegal way, has just sent me a small project to understand how I think inside a project in order to understand whether they should hire me or not.
I have a week to finish that.

It's only frontend, in ReactJS+Tailwind, based on a theme/framework.

I fucking despise ReactJS and specifically told them I much rather work on Angular.

I feel like
I'll just do this project at best, give it to them, wait until they give me the contract and they tell them they'd need to double my pay to have my ass.

Yeah, I just want them to waste time, just like they're wasting my time.

*Frustrated user noises* Whyyyy, Grafana, why don't you implement any actual query forgery checks?!

So long as a user has access to the Grafana frontend, they can happily forge the requests going off to the backend, and modify them to return *whatever* data they want from the datasource.

No matter that they're a read-only user. That only stops them from modifying the dashboard definitions on the frontend, but doesn't enforce any sort of immutability on the BE...

If anyone had any tips on how to further secure it, I'm curious...

In the same meeting
Well be moving on to open source technologies. You are devs and are expected to learn this on your own. Preferably on your own time
Minutes later.
Well be holding an agile workshop and also outside consultants to help the managers.
I left a few months later for multiple reasons.
I did stay for the first month and helped set up the angular project and structure. But i had to train a person who never worked with angular or anything frontend. It wasnt her fault. She was a developer and expected to learn on her own even tho she worked just backend before.

I am tired of switching my role at a startup where I work. I was primarily hired as a backend developer but some times i have to handle sprints, i have to become machine learning engineer, a devops engineer and now even frontend. Yuck. I am sòoooooo tired..

Saw a Job ad stating they give a brand new MacBook Air as you get hired (as a FrontEnd developer)

Is this a red flag? BC to me it really looks like a red flag.

Why would I specifically need a Mac? Just to test stuff on shitty Safari? I really hope so and I also really hope that it won't be to start developing iOS apps

I spent the whole damn day trying to setup grpc-web, but this protocol is documented so damn poorly!

You manage to set grpc up for one language and it’s all cool, then you stupidly think that you are free to reuse the compiler you used for the nodejs version for your frontend part but nope! Our web module is now deprecated, please use this module instead!

“Ah yes just clone the repo and check out (…) and you can also check this link whic is in no way highlighted in the middle of a wall of text (…)”

*checking the other page*
Ah yes you need to install a package available only on your unix machine (great! Screw the devs in my team who use windows I guess, they’ll be happy to hear this!) and don’t forget to clone this repo to build your own plugin! And by that I ofc mean to compile it on your own!

- compiler error
After digging for an hour you find a requirement in an obscure issue opened and closed cause “ah yes we have a dependency not stated anywhere” *close issue and never add it to the project*

Fine, fine I can survive this bs

- another compiler error, no solution found after 2 hours

Honestly? Why the fuck do I need to compile this stuff? Just give me a damn npm package I can use? Goddamn it’s just transpiling, you don’t need access to my OS! (Aside for fs to save the files, and which btw is accessible via nodejs)

Now, I COULD download the latest realease as a precompiled, but… honestly?
I give up, I’ll do some shitty rest apis cause the customer’s not paying me enough for even THINKING to go trough this shit again when they’ll ask an iOS app. Or having colleagues asking me to help them understand how to do it.

Side note: also add typescript support to the web-code-generation ffs! Why does node have it and web don’t?

Maybe it's hard to get CSS calc() right,
but to make it really complicated,
let SASS do its erratic magic on it

stateofjs survey reminds me of all that's wrong with JavaScript: too many frameworks each of which has to reinvent the wheel and depend on too many node_modules child dependencies, most don't support TypeScript properly (ever tried to convert a node-express-mongoose tutorial to TS?), there is still no proper type support in JS core language, and browser features get added in form of overly complex APIs instead of handy DOM methods.

Instead the community gets excited about micro-improvements like optional chaining which has been possible in other languages for decades.

At least there is something like TypeScript, but I don't like its syntax either, it's overly verbose and adds too much "Java feeling" to JavaScript in my opinion.

Also there is too much JS in web development, as CSS and HTML seem to have missed adding enough native functionality that works reliable cross browser to build websites in a descriptive way without misunderstanding web dev for application engineering.

After all, I'd rather have frontend PHP than more JavaScript everywhere.

Anyway, at least the survey has the option to choose how satisfied or unsatisfied people are about certain aspects of JS. But I already suspect that most respondents will seem to be very happy and eager to learn the latest hype train frameworks or stick to their beloved React in the future.

Our lead frontend dev insists on using <select> as a dropdown for a language switcher in the navbar of a website and then make the page redirect to the localized url using the onChange event with JS.

Am I wrong thinking that's just really, really dumb, or am I just dumb?

If you cannot pay my workload in frontend, just lemme do only the backend 🥲

frontend is very interesting as compared to backend. i find it nice that the technology evolved with a clear difference in frontend and backend. the whole sensors controlling, animations, music, videos, ... all belong to frontend code from which user is directly interacting. the whole data stuff , like transformation, crud, storage, transmission, etc stays on backend where it could be maintained properly.

i hope the industry don't mix them in future too(or if it does, like some new tech come up that removes the gap between FE nd BE, it must be worth it)

although i don't know much about ai/ml, open CV stuff and AR/VR . do the filters in snapchat, or the translator in google lens require a constant Frontend/backend connection?