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Search - "horrible ui"
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I've optimised so many things in my time I can't remember most of them.
Most recently, something had to be the equivalent off `"literal" LIKE column` with a million rows to compare. It would take around a second average each literal to lookup for a service that needs to be high load and low latency. This isn't an easy case to optimise, many people would consider it impossible.
It took my a couple of hours to reverse engineer the data and implement a few hundred line implementation that would look it up in 1ms average with the worst possible case being very rare and not too distant from this.
In another case there was a lookup of arbitrary time spans that most people would not bother to cache because the input parameters are too short lived and variable to make a difference. I replaced the 50000+ line application acting as a middle man between the application and database with 500 lines of code that did the look up faster and was able to implement a reasonable caching strategy. This dropped resource consumption by a minimum of factor of ten at least. Misses were cheaper and it was able to cache most cases. It also involved modifying the client library in C to stop it unnecessarily wrapping primitives in objects to the high level language which was causing it to consume excessive amounts of memory when processing huge data streams.
Another system would download a huge data set for every point of sale constantly, then parse and apply it. It had to reflect changes quickly but would download the whole dataset each time containing hundreds of thousands of rows. I whipped up a system so that a single server (barring redundancy) would download it in a loop, parse it using C which was much faster than the traditional interpreted language, then use a custom data differential format, TCP data streaming protocol, binary serialisation and LZMA compression to pipe it down to points of sale. This protocol also used versioning for catchup and differential combination for additional reduction in size. It went from being 30 seconds to a few minutes behind to using able to keep up to with in a second of changes. It was also using so much bandwidth that it would reach the limit on ADSL connections then get throttled. I looked at the traffic stats after and it dropped from dozens of terabytes a month to around a gigabyte or so a month for several hundred machines. The drop in the graphs you'd think all the machines had been turned off as that's what it looked like. It could now happily run over GPRS or 56K.
I was working on a project with a lot of data and noticed these huge tables and horrible queries. The tables were all the results of queries. Someone wrote terrible SQL then to optimise it ran it in the background with all possible variable values then store the results of joins and aggregates into new tables. On top of those tables they wrote more SQL. I wrote some new queries and query generation that wiped out thousands of lines of code immediately and operated on the original tables taking things down from 30GB and rapidly climbing to a couple GB.
Another time a piece of mathematics had to generate all possible permutations and the existing solution was factorial. I worked out how to optimise it to run n*n which believe it or not made the world of difference. Went from hardly handling anything to handling anything thrown at it. It was nice trying to get people to "freeze the system now".
I build my own frontend systems (admittedly rushed) that do what angular/react/vue aim for but with higher (maximum) performance including an in memory data base to back the UI that had layered event driven indexes and could handle referential integrity (overlay on the database only revealing items with valid integrity) or reordering and reposition events very rapidly using a custom AVL tree. You could layer indexes over it (data inheritance) that could be partial and dynamic.
So many times have I optimised things on automatic just cleaning up code normally. Hundreds, thousands of optimisations. It's what makes my clock tick.4 -
! exactly dev
I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.
As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.
To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(
As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.
Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.
Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.
Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.
So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).
Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.
Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.
I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.
I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.18 -
You know what's fucking horrible?
Implementing new features to an Android app in production that another dev wrote...
...which has no architecture, no documentation, no modularity, no testability, everything runs on the UI thread, filled with spaghetti code and it somehow works smoothely so I have to not fuck it up.
Oh and I'm also a junior. So fuck me, right?1 -
aaaaaghh fucking Handlers man. Android is so fucking full of shit, i wonder why am i still doing it. love is pain.
Why can't there be one mother fucking solution to all lazy ass asynchronous programming? handlers, threadpools, asynctask, executers, Broadcasts, intentService, coroutines, rxjava,.... i don't what new stuff are people snorting these days.
Ok , leave everything. A handler is class- no sorry, Handler, alongside some fucking Looper clss (and maybe some more stuff i don't know) other classes is a way of handling inter thread communication. Handlers can:
-send data to ui thread
-recieve data from ui thread
-send "messages" to ui thread
-recieve "messages" from ui thread.
- can be attached to ui thread
- can be attached to any child thread
- can be accessed anonymosly via any view
- can be present in multiple places, working together
- can kill night king with a dagger
- can do porn better than johnny sins
- can run for president of the whole fucking world
- do some more shits that i have yet to discover
And where do i find this? buried deep insides some medium articles or in some guy's horrible accent video.
Is background processing really this much of a toughnut to crack?
earlier i was all about using asynctask or foreground/background services, because these are the most easy to understand abstraction of a fairly difficult topic.
But as i see more projects, i see underlying apis like handlers, threadpools , executers , being directly used.
Why cant there be a fucking single abstraction, that could be "lightly tweaked" to handle every ugly case.6 -
Fucking MikTex.
Apparently this software got stuck somewhere back in the nineties. Got a fresh installation to make sure issues were not arising from outdated hardware - still connection errors, API errors, horrible, unresponsive and ugly UI, what a broken piece of ****.6 -
Meeting about brand new web app system to replace an ancient MFC app.
director: can we just use the old subsystem manager? (horrible mix of management ui and SOAP listeners in the same app...)
developers: No, that's an MFC app... not even just a server.
director: but... can't you just plug it in? you're using web components right?
developers: *weary sigh* -
Dear app, if you say that your update is for bug fixes, you better fix all those bugs instead of releasing and releasing an update with the same bugs still there. Better look into the UI/UX issues too. Your app looks horrible! Last time I was involved in it, everything is looking so fine I haven't had a bad review for a long time. Hope you can read this. #ktnxbye1
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I am working on a small project to help out a small theatre group. The guy who created their website decided to create it with horrible UI and UX. I plan to confront him with notes on how to improve the overall experience of navigating their website and if all goes to plan, I will help rewrite the entire website.1
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A dedicated team has built an "infrastructure" for creating UI for c++ developers in the company. What looks like a poor attempt at recreating what Microsoft did with XAML at first glance, it actually is a horrible exercise in force feeding people the stinking pile of shit that their code is.
The idea is to make it easy to create UI for developers who aren't used to front end development. They should just need to declare the layout. Very noble.
But.
If you want to do anything more than show a checkbox or a radio button, if you dare to define relationships between the UI controls or worse, if you get ambitious with creating a simple UI that uses a lot of similar controls and similar relationships with dynamic content... be prepared to eat your own barf from eating too much of their shit.
Not only do you now need to write front end code (including JS among others), you need to do it with limited or poor support and you have to make sure that it sits well with the house of moist, crumbly cards the team proudly created. Or resort to some very stupid and performance costing "bypasses" that further cripple your application code. Usually you have to do both of these things.
To think that scores of other teams have welcomed this amazing enhancement with full support without any resistance. It's sickening.
I waste too much of energy (and good jokes!) with these people.rant poor infra complicated as fuck punch holed abstractions we do what we want brain farts materialized in code no brains needed4 -
I started this one project as hobby, later on becomes we and we search for client. He assisted upto 30% only ui design. Now I am working 18,19 hours just to complete 2 project simultaneously. horrible experience taught me make sure you make written agreement before working as pair or partner
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Had to reinstall Gmail on my phone... Settings lost, it defaulted to push notifications for all messages.
Someone broke a per-page analytics call.
1,300 Sentry warning emails in an hour later, I'm finally annoyed enough to do something about it, but the settings UI is horrible. 😥 -
I finally created a kotlin android app for a simple project idea, just personal usage. Beginner level. Quite a good and bad experience.
Functionality is done, just sucks with UI, as I'm not proficient enough with styling on android.
The result is a predefined purple action bar at the top, an almost white text section right below it with *very* light-grey textview descriptions (you can guess how visible they are on my phone...). Center is a big recyclerview, which in android studio has white background with dark grey text items, yet is black on my phone with white text items. At the bottom 3 text inputs and a centered purple "add" button.
... It's a mess as long as you don't know how to design and style on android studio.2 -
Who else finds HTML/CSS to be just plain bad?
since that's what the web adopted, apparently no matter what you are developing if it involves a GUI then the design method almost always follows in the same path as the web.
that's not the issue though, the real problem is that the web adopted a very horrible way to create a UI, while HTML might have been fine for 90s-style websites I just feel like its a very lousy way to create a modern interactive webapp UI, its just very painfully obvious that it wasn't designed for that purpose. remind me again what HTML stands for? "HyperText Markup Language" yea that sounds about right. and CSS really doesn't help but double down on the flaws of HTML.
on a whim I can come up with a better method:
instead of the weird <body><footer> structure, why not have say "objects that flow in a 2D space", you define the parameters location and dimension of these objects, with something like javascript they interact with each other and just like div in HTML objects contain smaller objects.
this makes a lot more sense than the footer/body design or the obviously duck-taped attempts at controlling the style in CSS, like flow, and absolute-position.
am I alone in this?9