Sister's new boyfriend at xmas party: So what do you do for a living?

Me: Well, I would say I'm a "full stack" developer, but what does that even mean anymore right? With the state of front-end development being in a constant state of flux and/or kissing its own ass, and every client demanding their one page website used solely for their phone number be offline first WPA SPA Web 7.0 REST Enabled clusterfuck that requires using at least 65% of the AWS stack, most of it completely uselessly. But hey, Neural Network AI looks good on your "grandma's cookies" website, and for only $9,000 per month you can now set the timer on your oven from your phone. So, man, I guess even though I've now been at it twenty years, even I'm not sure what the fuck it is I do anymore. How about you?

Sister's Boyfriend: I'm unemployed.

I'm so sick of all these fat frontend websites.

Transferring dozens of megabytes of mostly unused libraries is not acceptable.

A browser tab crunching up CPU time because everything must be "beautifully animated" (🤢) and processed without involving page reloads/backend is not acceptable.

A response time of over a second is not acceptable.

Cryptic error messages and random popups asking you to reload your page, not acceptable.

Sticky elements/popups breaking access on small screens is not acceptable.

Running hundreds of ajax calls per minute as heartbeats/probes
and crashing the page when the internet has a hiccup, not acceptable.

Fuck Asana, Fuck Twitch, Fuck LinkedIn, Fuck Youtube, Fuck the dozens of other SPAs which unload their truckload of diarrhea into a tab, yet fail to load crucial functionality about half of the time.

Fuck any page that breaks when you block Facebook, Doubleclick, Twitter or Google Analytics. To hell with websites depending on cookies or javascript loaders to display anything.

I want webpages to be interactive informational documents again.

Fuck off with your apps.

If you want to make an app, learn to use a real language, and get the fuck out of my browser.

- Fuck mobile apps that open links in embedded browser windows
- Fuck Wordpress page builders that use the single content field as an embedded IDrag&DropE.
- Fuck unindented HTML markup
- Fuck plugins with "pro" versions that provide more than 50% of the advertised features.
- Fuck building an app with a SPA framework and then adding SSR cuz ur SEO is fucked.
- Fuck Javascript transitions that are meant to make a site look fancy but slow it the fuck down.

Fuck it.

Vent your frustrations

API Request validation is stupid.

Until you remember
* Your target audience is highschool students
* Your front end dev loves to fuck your stuff up
* His mom works in QA and she equally likes to fuck shit up
* It's just a good idea
* People just fucking suck

So let's talk about CNAs, Captive Network Assistants, these downsized browser that open on Smartphones when you try to login to a free wifi which requires you to buy sometging or accept some terms.

I fucking hate them. I'm a web dev which has to deal with these dumbfucks.

Back in the time, there was this dumbfuck who had the idea to capture http requests on network level and response with a redirect to his own landing page. Fuck this guy. Then some dudes had the idea of the CNA as a privacy security feature. A good idea. But also this guys: "hey, let's make them a huge pain to develop for".Fuck them, too. But then came the companies saying: "hey make us a huge SPA with all features we can think of for this fucktard of a browser."

I hate fucking CNAs

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

Why the fuck nobody talks about Multi-page apps?! We went from a Web where everything was Multi-page server-rendered, and now everything for Web developers is "Single-page apps".

What about websites who can't do that? Not everything can be a single-page app. Only my uncle's restaurant website, or something which is TRULY a full app. No half choices.
If your website is a multi-page app/portal which actually PRELOADS data, instead of doing 100 fetch to an API within a page that is full of loading bars, well, your life is a pain.
When you want a first contentful paint which isn't a white page, well, your life is a pain.
What are React, Vue, Ember, Angular (let's exclude Svelte and Marko) going to do about Multi-page apps and SSR?

React-router sucks to me. It's performance is weak and it's useful only when you have an SPA with multiple sections which can be treated as pages (e.g. A single SPA divided in tabs).
Server-side rendering is the worst pain ever made by humanity, in React (and prob Vue, I didn't try but I can bet). And even when made easier from libs like Svelte and Marko, I (personally) can't get it to be faster enough compared to a traditional website without a JS framework and with a templating engine.
Anyways, if there's anything that I learnt from React, is to stay away from Next.js. Perfect, beautiful, mess.

All JS frameworks just seem to bloat the code and make it worse and slower, even though they're REALLY helpful.

Why? Why everyone loves them if their downsides are so clear? Why 3 projects out of 3 I made (1 React SSR, 1 Vue, 1 Marko SSR) are and will stay painfully slow and bloated, full of shit, even if in 2020 we should have evolved with the famous three shaking, with the famous lazy loading, etc.?

I am just frustrated.
And let's not even talk about Webpack, Rollup, Lasso, those module bundlers shit which are harder to configure and understand than finding a needle in a haystack.
Lasso was the easiest to configure but I anyways can't understand it. Webpack seems it was made to handle SPAs, as any tool in this freaking world, and not even considering an easy way to integrate multiple bundles for multiple pages (I know it's pretty easy, but with component sharing between pages and big unique bundles Next.js handles it soooo bad it feels like hell).

Am I the only one?

Sorry for the long rant. I just needed to rant right now.

I remember when first iPhone came out, The only broken shit while browsing was panning and pinching(most of the pages did not have responsive design) but they worked. Now every fucking webpage is mobile friendly, except all of them are fucking broken! You don't have safari or Chrome? Then fuck you! Here you have this BIG fucking button that does not work. Fuck all SPA!

The whole episode of me managing an outsourced team for about 6 months. I thought because I’ve managed other teams doing non dev things, it would be like that.

I’ve never been so wrong and NEVER AGAIN! I had to own everything and they’re code is so repetitive and confusing. It misses basic structure because I didn’t outline some things like knowing when a operation is complete and that if the same button appears in two pages it should do the same thing! Or that is you break up a SPA you shouldn’t just duplicate the whole files and then confusingly use randomly parts to so random jobs across all layers of the app. Ffs. Never want to work with a team that doesn’t have a plan to maintain the code they write. I felt like a failure but for me to make them successful I would have had to pretty much write the code.

Now I have to explain this embarrassing pile of curry spaghetti to my colleagues who need to do some other work on it. Fuck. I want to throw it out and start over so badly.

I should have told my boss a hard no on that one and let him know outsourcing would slow things down not speed them up. He just needs to stop trying to get software developed and deployed at the same time. Fuckers.

For fucking 8 hours, I'm not able to get the text on a div that populates after a ajax on a SPA.... Fuck fuck fuck

If your SPA doesn't work with the browsers navigation buttons . . . go fuck yourself and fix your application.

At work I have to deal with an application that manages work tickets. There's a login page, an overview console and a page for each individual ticket (and a whole bunch of other pages that I'll ignore for this rant.) If I click on a ticket to view it I go to a new page, right?

What happens if I want to go back to the overview? I hit back on my browser. That should take me back!

WRONG

Nope. Because it's a single page application with no fucking routing programmed, the browser still thinks that the login page is the last page so it takes me there instead.

Like come on, good UX/UI design takes advantage of what the user expects and what the user is used to. The user expects the back button to take him back one page, and therefore it is the responsibility of a SPA developer to mimic that capability in his app. I don't know what framework this web page uses (it has none of the recognizable hallmarks of React or Angular) but for gods sake, implement a freaking router.

Horror story and rant time I guess...

I haven't seen the main developer of this MVC project that I've been working on but I can totally assure that his seniority isn't in frontend development 😠 and I doubt the backend too... Fucking DataTables converted to IDictionaries<string,object>

Guess who need to build on top of the pile of shit!

Anyway, I wasn't really careful about what kind of template I was given to work on a new SPA page, so I'm doing the job given the time, but it's fucking gory:
- matrioska style layers (n.3) without documentation
- partials everywhere
- too much inline styling
- too many <style> sections (n per layer or partial)
- too many <script> sections (n per layer or partial)
- poor CSS styling or no styling at all! (classes without any style nor js association)😠

He's just been lucky that the browser is capable of handling his shit

Now that at the end of this year I'll leave this project (solo fullstack) and need to provide documentation for the next poor souls I was thinking to leave behind something at par of my skills and capabilities but analysing the current mess ticks my brain in a bad way, fuck you Marco!
Fuck you
and your seniority
and the Italian way of perceiving seniority that gives you a higher living in the wrong side of the field 🤬🤬🤬

Fuck. I just realized that because I picked Firebase for an SPA I was making for a client a year ago, I will need to keep updating the damn backend forever. Node 8 has reached EOL in the end of 2019, so Firebase has deprecated it and will *remove support* for it in 2021. Ok, I updated the app to work with node 10. But what happens when node 10 gets deprecated and loses support? Am I going to be forced to update the project once again so that it can keep running? Have the people at Firebase heard of backwards compatibility?

The reason I chose Firebase in the first place was because I wouldn't have to deal with servers (stuff like that scared me back then) and because it was free (client likes free stuff, of course). Had I picked a simple Express + MongoDB combo I would be able to deploy the thing when I was done and just leave it there forever, at the cost of ~$5/mo on DigitalOcean. But no, I was scared of the unknown so now I have to live with the shitfest that Firebase is. Fucking hell.

Disclaimer: I would not use Express and MongoDB in a project today, I have outgrown JS backend (thank god) and I prefer the safety of a relational DB.

Le me.

Tasked with eval’ing SPA frameworks.

Gets down to business with Vue.

Fuck this shit.

It’s lovely when it works, but heaven help you if *anything* is slightly off.

What the fuck is Webpack?! Fucking ugly-ass, hydra-looking fuckery is what it is.

Cypress? Hah! Does it want to work? No it fucking does not.

Does anything tell me what’s wrong? Nope.

I love OSS, but so much of it a complete clusterfuck of duct tape and prayers.