I just hate npm dependencies.

If you want to write a small website with npm dependencies (some frontend deps like Bootstrap and some development deps like gulp or babel) you will have more npm dependencies in your project than own code. It is ridiculous, how some lazy developers just add dependencies to their projects, without evaluating their dependencies. The source code of one of my projects is around 4MB (without any dependencies). If you then run yarn as required, it grows to around 80MB (where 73MB are node_modules).

This is just terrible.

I rant about this, as I made the mistake to upload my node_modules directories when restoring a backup of my server. Worst idea one could ever have.

Sums up our current job at work - a rushed redesign of a rushed web app.

I've fucking had it with youtube, fucking jizz slapping knob butlers. I'm going to setup a mirror on my server, the idea is:

- Setup a youtube-dl cron that fetches multiple times a day both audio and video versions of the music playlist I have, hopefully with some sort of progress tracking of each download and total, so I could check if it has run successfully and have a nice dashboard, might need to do that myself (except if compactd proves itself to manage that all)

- Need to figure out a way to download the "best" quality but not go beyond 1080p, since if some videos for some reason are uploaded @ 4k, that'll be a waste of space

- Have Compactd/Funkwhale/Koel as the music player frontend for the audio version of the files, preferably one of them should offer download of the files too, so I could have a similar setup to spotify, though I could probably also just have some filebrowser installed or have a password protected index.

- Not sure what to use for the video versions, since sometimes the video goes with the music; plex? emby? suggestions are welcome

- Saw somebody (ab)using google drive as their backup for all the music they download, so I want to setup something similar, rsyncing all videos and music to some account, so in case shit majorly hits the fan, I can just download everything back

A friend has a small business and asked me if I could make him a small program. So why not, experience for me and I can help a friend out. (This started in ~mid 2016)

Started out as a WPF desktop application with many weird bugs and slow interface, into crashing the database on AWS (could not connect, could not get a backup). It was just hell and I kind of gave up on fixing it.

I always talked to him and said "yeah, I will do something better soon", but I was procrastinating and kept pushing it away from me. Then one day I said "f*ck it - lets go" and started coding on 2.0:

- WebApp with a complete new architecture (which I learned in the past few months)
- User authentication (JWT)
- ASP.NET Core Backend for web api
- Angular 4 Frontend w/ bootstrap
- Coded in like a week with 3-5 hours each day

Deployed around 6 months ago and he never had a complain. When I visited him I asked "how is your application doing?" - "great. it just works!".

My once most hated project turned into the most successful project in just a few months.

PouchDB.

It promised full-blown CRDT functionality. So I decided to adopt it.

Disappointment number one: you have to use CouchDB, so your data model is under strict regulations now. Okay.

Disappointment number two: absolutely messed up hack required to restrict users from accessing other users’ data, otherwise you have to store all the user data in single collection. Not the most performant solution.

Disappointment number three: pagination is utter mess. Server-side timestamps are utter mess. ANY server-side logic is utter mess.

Just to set it to work, you need PouchDB itself, websocket adapter (otherwise only three simultaneous syncs), auth adapter (doesn’t work via sockets), which came out fucking large pile of bullshit at the frontend.

Disappointment number four, the final one: auth somehow works but it doesn’t set cookie. I don’t know how to get access.

GitHub user named Wohali, number one CouchDB specialist over there, doesn’t know that either.

It also doesn’t work at Incognito mode, doesn’t work at Firefox at all.

So, if you want to use PouchDB, bear that in mind:
1. CouchDB only
2. No server-side logic
3. Authorization is a mess
4. Error logs are mess too: “ERROR 83929629 broken pipe” means “out of disk space” in Erlang, the CouchDB language.
5. No hosting solutions. No backup solutions, no infrastructure around that at all. You are tied to bare metal VPS and Ansible.
6. Huge pile of bullshit at frontend. Doesn’t work at Incognito mode, doesn’t work at Firefox.

When I started doing frontend development, I was quite shocked with how people managed to cowboy code their way into building fully functional products with a decent paying client base.

I am talking about fully function SaaS with payment gateway and all, but no version control beyond full backup copies, and spaghetti code everywhere you can literally bring the website down trying to change the homepage design.

... and the startups that managed to do better, some of them forgot the .git on production exposing their entire source code *facepalm*

Not a productive day. I wanted to restore part of database from test server but downloading data using reat api was getting timeouts.

I made simple app that dumps data and I launched process in screen and started watching Dragon ball
I like those old first series with young Songo looking for his grandpa.

After about 2 hours and partial backup still not finished I started to cut crap data from backup script will finish it tomorrow.

Looks like my ux is still ok and views got almost all approved.
Need to fix some shit on backend but I need those backups to work for more complicated customers.

Luckily frontend developer is back so he will handle visual parts.

Maybe we will release new features on the beginning of February.