Some empty-headed helpdesk girl skipped into our office yesterday afternoon, despite the big scary warning signs glued to the door.

"Hey, when I log in on my phone, the menu is looking weird"

"Uh... look at my beard"

"What"

"Just look at this beard!"

"Uh.... OK"

"Does this look like a perfectly groomed beard"

"Uh... it's pretty nice I guess"

"You don't have to lie"

She looks puzzled: "OK... maybe it could use a little trimming. Uh... a lot of trimming". "I still like it though" she adds, trying hard to be polite.

"I understand you just started working here. But the beard... the beard should make it clear. See the office opposite to this one?"

"Yeah"

"Perfectly groomed ginger beards. It's all stylish shawls and smiles and spinach smoothies. Those people are known as frontend developers, they care about pixels and menus. Now look at my beard. It is dark and wild, it has some gray stress hairs, and if you take a deep breath it smells like dust and cognac mixed with the tears caused by failed deploys. Nothing personal, but I don't give a fuck what a menu looks like on your phone."

She looked around, and noticed the other 2 tired looking guys with unshaven hobo chins. To her credit, she pointed at the woman in the corner: "What about her, she doesn't seem to have a beard"

Yulia, 1.9m long muscled database admin from Ukraine, lets out a heavy sigh. "I do not know you well enough yet to show you where I grow my unkempt graying hairs... . Now get lost divchyna."

Helpdesk girl leaves the scene.

Joanna, machine learning dev, walks in: "I saw a confused blonde lost in the hallway, did you give her the beard speech?"

"Yeah" -- couldn't hold back a giggle -- "haha now she'll come to you"

Joanna: "No I already took care of it"

"How?"

"She started about some stupid menu, so I just told her to smell my cup". Joanna, functional alcoholic, is holding her 4pm Irish coffee. "I think this living up to our stereotype tactic is working, because the girl laughed and nodded like she understood, and ran off to the design department"

Me: "I do miss shaving though"

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

OH MY FUCKING GOD!
What is the point in separating us into backend/frontend developers if everyone has to learn/do everything?

And now this FUCKING DUMBASS that is leaving!!! The company convinced my FUCKING STUPID boss to start using react with nodejs on the new platforms ...

Did anyone think about talking to the fucking devops that maintain the fucking deployments about this????
By the way, this sucker is me.

And now I have one month to: deploy a new app... ALONE!! learning fucking react (please kill me) and probably merge it in a clusterfuck of unseparated backend/frontend because fuck it.

Oh, and figure out a way to make deployment automated and easy for me at least.

I'm about to rant in real life...

Would the web be better off, if there was zero frontend scripting? There would be HTML5 video/audio, but zero client side JS.

Browsers wouldn't understand script tags, they wouldn't have javascript engines, and they wouldn't have to worry about new standards and deprecations.

Browsers would be MUCH more secure, and use way less memory and CPU resources.

What would we really be missing?

If you build less bloated pages, you would not really need ajax calls, page reloads would be cheap. Animated menus do not add anything functionally, and could be done using css as well. Complicated webapps... well maybe those should just be desktop/mobile apps.

Pages would contain less annoying elements, no tracking or crypto mining scripts, no mouse tracking, no exploitative spam alerts.

Why don't we just deprecate JS in the browser, completely?

I think it would be worth it.

me: "ugh frontend is so stupid, i wish i only did backend"

also me: "i should be working on backend, but i just added some dopeass icons to my website"

I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.

What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?

There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.

I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or

B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.

Impossible decision here.

If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.

But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.

So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.

Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.

Such fucking wonderful code.

I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.

Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?

This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.

Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.

Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.

Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.

React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.

Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.

I'm getting so fucking tired of frontend development...

I still like part of it, but I really hate CSS, browser compatibility, stupid users, dumb requests from product owners and fucking weird designs. And to top it all, it's the frontend team that handles all the pressure when the deadline comes up and the project's late, even if it was the product/design/whatever phase that took too much time.

Being a frontend developer is very stressful and has so many annoyances and I'm getting sick of it.

My company's been promising giving me some backend work because there are some backend-heavy projects coming up and they know I have the skills, but they just keep giving me frontend work. Also, one of our frontend developers is on leave, which means more work for the rest of us.

Why did I ever decided to do frontend development?

I’m tired of all these profane “frontend developers” who do nothing but get cheap internet points by shitting on web technologies.

Bitch, NPM is just a package manager. That’s what it is. Anyone who ever used a package manager already knows how to use NPM.

Here on devrant, there at your workplace, people hear nothing but bitching when you open your mouth. You always need a “solid task description” and “best practices”. You always need somebody else to do your job for you. Frontend is the area where you have to constantly switch between heavy, performance-oriented coding, UX and graphic design while remaining in a dynamic environment that is called “web”, no wonder why you can’t do that. Instead of bitching, you could just present your own solution you designed with just a little bit of product-oriented thinking. But noooo, you fucking bother designers whenever you’re not sure about “how many pixels is that padding”.

You can only be barely productive (and only with a frozen spec) but can never take the lead just once.

In the 80s your kind of approaches were doubted, by the 90s they were dead. In 2020s they’re straight up laughable.

And don’t get me started on CSS. You have to be an absolute buffoon of a developer to not know how to use a DECLARATIVE tool that don’t even require real structural thinking.

No wonder why you praise php. You throw shit all over the place and tell everybody that you’re a “sociopath” and you don’t need that “stupid frontend” and “stupid users”. But you know what? Any real backend or embedded dev would’ve laughed at your face.

Because backend developers are respected.

You’re not.

I fucking hate my boss so much

He looks down on me like I’m some idiot who doesn’t know his shit.
The other day he was trying to explain OAuth2.0 to me in the most dumbed down way ever, even after telling him I do already know how OAuth 2.0 works. He just said “oh well just making sure” and continued explaining it to me the exact same way. Felt shitty having something explained to you which you already know in such a way in front of all of your coworkers

Whenever I give my thoughts on something he answers with an argument that’s essentially true but pretty stupid:

B: “We don’t need to bundle our JS files” (see my other rant)
M: “Our load time is around 15 seconds though and it takes forever to update our script tags”
B: “Yes but it’s only 15 seconds once and the tags are already there so it’s fine”

How do you reply to something like that??

On top of that, his code is absolutely awful, always looks hacked together, lacks documentation and i don’t think he has written a unit test in his life

I don’t even like frontend, was told I would mostly do backend and it seems like all I’m doing recently is write fucking javascript because even if I wanted to write backend code, it’s nearly impossible to write clean code in this pile of horseshit codebase

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

The biggest lesson I learned in Frontend Dev is: listen to users, not clients.

There are so many rants about stupid ass clients on here, and when you let clients treat you like that, it's kind of your own fault. Look at how people use your interfaces and you will immediately see what's bullshit about them. When you have user behavior as an argument basis, clients will listen to you.

Fuck stupid managers.

My current agency tried to create a bundle of generic Microservices with the hope of save time and money on future projects. That was two years ago (i was working here from 4 months ago).

What they have now? well, a sort of distributed monolyth were if one service goes down, everything else fails, infinite technical debt, no security policies (yeah, all the apis are open!!!) Business rules on the frontend . . .

And what the stupid manager say? "Everything must be ok because i designed it very well, i research a lot for this"

Stupid boomer.

PD: Yeah, despite the fact he is judt a manager, he take the responsibility to design the full architecture, idk why no one srops him.

So I finished 6-month long frontend studies and the school proposed internship in one of the best local coding companies. I got their test, basically to write 'API-based internet app with any of JS frameworks'.

Me: 'Hooray!!!'. Couple of days later, app delivered. Made with jQuery (because this is the only js framework the fucking coding school taught me). Very long, very personal cover letter sent along with it.

They: ' We are sorry, but we will not consider anything written with jQuery'.

Me: 'OK'. Learning ReactJS alone by myself for two weeks, 8-10 hours daily. Another two weeks - another project delivered. News agregator, fetching from 3 APIs and merging news based on publication time. News categories, news search - all the bells and whistles. Made 100% myself - not some clone from Udemy workshop or youtube.

They: 'Sorry, your project isn't good enough'.

Me (silently): Fuck you too, stupid HR manager. If you aren't able to see the motivation and dedication in a person, shove a dildo up your ass.

F the app store. My app is getting rejected because they claim 10% of my product should not need an user account to view. Now I have to spend another week changing my frontend and backend, delay my launch, just to satisfy what is essentially a stupid Apple-only UX requirement. This exact same binary was approved a week before... Seriously, screw the reviewers and the high horse executives at Apple.

"You can never understand everything, but you can push yourself to understand the system"

If I hear this stupid quote one more time I will scream.

Node.js is a piece of shit and thanks to Ryan Dahl, we now have to deal with ugly JS not only on the frontend, but also the backend.

Finally got the opportunity to work as fullstack more oriented to backend as a side gig and I fucking love it.

Now I can say with all my heart that I hate my main frontend job and designers so much. I hate every small task like:
- change this arrow
- change this button
- change this color
- well this is not accessible.
- well this doesn't pass contrast check ( as if this is my fucking job and not the stupid fuck designer who mixes up colors )

Now I'm just trying to consider a reconversion and git gud .

Muahahaha!
Stupid canvas! I killed you!
No more anti-aliasing for you! Now it's time for pixel perfect drawings and a finally functioning floodfill algorithm!
I only had to make my own full custom drawing routine. It is not that I had other things to do, right?!

Seriously: Who the heck decided to implement anti-aliasing for a canvas that cannot be deactivated? Who!?

Oh, I hate frontend so much. That's not my world...

Fuck you javascript. You're the worst. Fuck you fuck you. Why I became a fucking frontend developer. Fuck me and my stupid idea to get hired as a...
Oh nvm found the bug. JS is za best.

So, I browse to a video livestream and an annoying ad starts before the livestream is shown. Furthermore, the page jumps around because of a cookie notification that also blocks some UI elements at the top.

Note: this is the website of a public (government-paid) national news website with very high standards and a good reputation.

Action 1: refresh page; I hope the ad is skipped. Nope, annoying ad restarts. Page jumps around again because of the cookie notification.

Action 2: accept cookies to remove notification blocking the top UI (it's OK, I know it can't actually save any cookies on my machine). Instead of some nice JS doing it for me in the background, the page refreshes because you know, HTTP requests and whatnot.

Annoying ad restarts again... FML 🤬

Lessons to be learned from this for any web dev: these annoyances can and *will* exponentially get worse if used simultaneously against your users, instead of being used to help or inform your users.

As a user of you website, I want to watch a livestream. I don't care what stupid legislation forced you to shove a fucking cookie notification in my face. Make sure it is not annoying me to the point that I close you website and take minutes to rant about it!

Also, give me the freedom of choice to watch an ad or not. You and I both know that some ads simply are not for me. Better save yourself and myself the bandwidth.

And go get good at web development. You're a news site. That's more than just text and images. If you want great apps, social media coverage, videos, live streams, blogs, etc. go get some better web devs. Your current web frontend devs only qualify to get fired.

Do you think this is a stupid tech stack to create a sleep tracking app? Angular as the frontend and Wordpress rest api as backend. I need to use these for a college project...

The rear ducking continues. We've built a reliable translator in the dumbest fucking way possible, it's just lovely. I simply reused the structure for feeding data to the VM assembler, an array of arrays, where there's one array of (ins [args]) per node in the parse tree.

It's nice because nodes can be solved out of order without affecting the actual sequence in which the instructions are output. And if one statement (node) equals multiple instructions, you just push multiple entries to the corresponding array, or push nothing if you need to output nothing. Easy as goblin pie.

This is enough to convert an input language to the assembly-like intermediate representation we use for the virtual machine. So then there's doing it backwards: walk the same array of arrays, and map those virtual instructions to a physical architechture. I guess I could do the encoding to native binary myself, it'd certainly be interesting to try, but I'm burnt-out already so I'll just use fasm for now.

Initial test: wrote a test program in my own stupid language, ran the translator, dump output to file, assemble that with fasm, run with r2 -d.

Crashes? No.
Runs fine? Yes and no.

For fuck's sake, I don't have syscalls. Mainly because the VM doesn't have an operating system, lmao. I was testing virtual programs by just freezing state, terminating, then dumping the fucking registers and stack to the console, we have no I/O to speak of. Not even a real 'exit', VM handles that by reading a return value every step like a mentally damaged son of a bitch.

So anyway, I manually paste the linux mambo, you know:

mov rax,60
mov rdi,0
syscall

And NOW our program can end execution without crashing.
Okay then, so does the test code work correctly?

** DRUM ROLL **

Yes.

Ladies and gentlemen, mother fucking PESO is now a compiled language, and going forward I will be expectantly receiving your marriage proposals for reviewing. Oh, but not so fast, we still need a frontend...

Well, we'll handle that in the next few days. I'm just glad to be *nearly* finished with this fucking compiler, I want nothing to do with anything else ever, but we know that's not going to happen, so Lord please end my pain.

No sponsor as this rant has been paid for by tax evasion.

Okay I got a genius/exceptionally stupid idea.
Some of you may know Xi. If not, it's an, in development, text editor backend, written in Rust.
It does all the heavy lifting and communicates changes with the Frontend over an rpc-api, typically on stdin/stdout.

Now, why don't we do this, but for other kinds of applications, that have been reinvented a million times, because a feature is missing or the ui has been shit.
Cross-Platform backends for file-managers, web browsers, password managers, media players,...

Hey ranters, I want to setup a centralised auth backend that assigns multiple logins/API keys to a single user account which is managed through a Frontend application.

Background is we use multiple services each with their own login system and not all support a unified login/auth method for their API.

My approach is to setup a simple API/Auth backend that stores the users credentials plus multiple API-Keys of other services or their logins. When auth is successful the Frontend app may receive the associated credentials for the other backends to call their respective API. So the user can login once but the Frontend may access all backend services without the user noticing that their are other auths.

This should be a really general problem today. I'm really just diving into the topic of auth and Frontend, so I hope to get some guidence/overview from you. My questions are:

- Is my approach totally stupid?
- Are there good frameworks you'd recommend for such a setup?
- Is there a best practice which I've overseen so far?
- Resources you think are a must-read?
- Any other recommendations regarding security here?

So, what do you ranters think?

For anyone that has used or is using repl.it, I'm thinking about using it for a project at uni.
The project is a Java program with a HTML, CSS, JS interface.
If I open my project as a Java project in repl.it, is there a way to just run the HTML? It'd be stupid to run the whole app just to debug the frontend...

Node server with webpack poly fill on embedded device. Why 😂 .

Replacing node-fetch with node http instead of waiting for native node fetch API. Why 😂

All npm scripts on package.json are dead. Why 😂

Node server is not even sharing TS interfaces with frontend.

Customers are complaining about MeM0r1 L3k and let's build more features on stupid node.

Fucking kill me.