I wonder when there will be the first manufacturer to introduce the "cool" new notch design to normal screens. 🤔

New senior dev joined the project today.
Senior dev: "There's no way for me to test my changes before I merge this into develop"
Me: "Can you at least run our test suite?"
An hour later the develop branch is fucked and everyone who has merged it locally has pages of red errors splattered across their screens whenever they run any tests.
Start looking into what the fuck is going on.
Notice that all the errors are related to changes the new guy made.
Ask him if he ran the tests..
Senior dev: "Nah they wouldn't catch anything locally "
Stare at the stream of red text running down my screen.
Normally I wouldn't care but we were trying to prepare a release... RUN THE FUCKING TESTS ASSHOLE.

Me: Oh I see were using a non-standard architecture on this app. I like this bit but what is this doing? never seen it before.

Him: Ah we use that to abstract the navigation layer.

Me: oh ok, interesting idea, but that means we need an extra file per screen + 1 per module. We also can't use this inbuilt control, which I really like, and we've to write a tonne of code to avoid that.

Him: Yeah we wanted to take a new approach to fix X, this is what we came up with. Were not 100% happy with it. Do you have any ideas?

**
Queue really long, multi-day architecture discussion. Lots of interesting points, neither side being precious or childish in anyway. Was honestly fantastic.
**

Me: So after researching your last email a bit, I think I found a happy middle ground. If we turn X into a singleton, we can store the state its generating inside itself. We can go back to using the in-built navigation control and have the data being fetched like Y. If you want to keep your dependency injection stuff, we can copy the Angular services approach and inject the singletons instead of all of these things. That means we can delete the entire layer Z.

Even with the app only having 25% of the screens, we could delete like 30+ files, and still have the architecture, at a high level, identical and textbook MVVM.

Him: singleton? no I don't like those, best off keeping it the way it is.

... are you fucking kidding me? You've reinvented probably 3 wheels, doubled the code in the app and forced us to take ownership of something the system handles ... but a singleton is a bad idea? ... based off no concrete evidence or facts, but a personal opinion.

... your face is a bad idea

A few years back, there was a super repetitive task I needed to do to create a bunch of new screens for a new feature.

The task was so repetitive that I just couldn't bring myself to do it, and was avoiding it as long as possible.

Finally the day came where I needed to get it done. I sat at the computer readying myself to finally start/finish the task.

As I was going through the files, I could see all the work had already been done..? Confused, I opened up git history, and saw that I had checked the files in a few nights back.

Best I could do was trace it back to a house party where I was the last to go to sleep.

That was the day that I realised the power of auto-pilot :)

"New revolutionary technology, ai powered smartphone, 720° camera, 8 screens"

Cool

Can i have 2 days battery life instead?

New job, started two months ago. Forced to use a MacBook. First time using iShit in my life.

- Laptop reboots randomly every three weeks or so "because of an error" (thanks, very informative error message).

- Sometimes if I use two screens and I lock my laptop, only one screen gets locked.

- The most simple tasks require a fucking large number of clicks. There are almost no keyboard shortcuts. My hand hurts because of this, and after two months the pain is getting worse and worse.

- Yes, I know there are apps that give you extra keyboard shortcuts, but those don't help much. I never used a mouse in 10 years.

- Window management sucks. It's so broken and poor in so many ways, I don't know where to start.

- Random errors and pop-ups are the norm.

- I have only four fucking USB Type C ports. I can somehow understand having only Type C because it looks cool, but fuck at least give me 6 of them, or 8. Do you really have to force me to use a USB hub, in addition to a shitload of adapters?

- Multiple monitors don't work unless the laptop is connected to the power adapter.

- The above point means, in practice, that I have exactly zero USB Type C ports available to me: one is used for the power adapter, two are for the two monitors, and one for the USB hub. Whenever I have to connect something that has Type C, I have to choose between monitors and going fuck myself.

- I don't want to comment on performance, cooling system or battery life. This would be a waste of time. Let's just say that it's shit.

Now, dear Apple fangirls and fanboys, please downvote this rant. I want your downvotes, so please don't hesitate to press that (--) button. But please let me say that these products are shit, pure shit. Fuck Apple and their overpriced products.

Sales manager: Hi all, we are launching a new internal hackathon. Form up a team with the right expertise to help with address the problem statement and get going!

Me: what’s the problem statement?

Sales manager: you have to sign up first. There’s proprietary company info with our plans for next year involved. You have to agree to terms and conditions before continuing. Legal say so.

Me:

*signs up*,
*fills in docU-sign*,
*clicks through 3 other screens*

Ok let’s see this problem statement.

“What new and magical customer experience can you create and launch to win in our markets”

... that’s not a fucking problem statement ... and why the fuck does that require filling out a docu-sign form to see?

I REALLY fucking hate legal / sales people. Wasting everyone’s time.

Got my VisionTek Radeon 7750 today! Held my breath during the amd drivers installation on Linux (KDE Neon) but it all went well.

Rebooted, all screens (4 right now? upgrading to 6 soon) black.

Closed eyes, opened after 10 seconds and BAM, first display is working.

After some settings tweaking I've got 4 monitors up and running now, waiting for new hardware for two more.

Also waiting for a hex monitor stand ❤.

AMD, thanks for providing stable and working drivers for Linux for free!

Got the iPod and music synchronisation isn't working well with Linux (I've synced quite some iProducts and it always goes great so this is a new one for me).

Bought a windows pc a few days ago and haven't installed Linux onto it yet so booted it up, installed Firefox and then downloaded iTunes.

Nearly done with installing when an error message pops up and the entire fucker blue-screens. Now it doesn't boot anymore 😡

Go die in a fucking corner, windows.

My biggest hurdle was finding a way to go from my old 1400*900 screens to 1080p
Needles to say i finally was able to upgrade after years

Well here is my new setup.
Left and center screens are connected to one laptop. Where I run my editors and terminals.
Rightmost is connected to another old laptop. This is for browsing and slack.
Using synergy to share mouse and keyboard.
What do you think of this setup? Any better way to do this?

I've uncovered the complot.

I clearly remember buying my first monitor, it was 15 inch, 1024x768. Then I went to a 19 inch 1680x1050 one, then 24 inch 1080p, then 27 inch 1440p...

Now I used two 32 inch 4K screens at work... and I come home, and the three 27 inch screens look a bit smallish, with the old 24 inch one being absolutely tiny on my desk.

It wasn't that tiny when I still owned the 15 inch screen? And my 5.5 inch phone doesn't feel as big as when I bought it either?

So the complot... All monitors slowly shrink over time, and they start shrinking faster when new monitors are brought into the household.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

So yesterday our team got a new toy. A big ass 4k screen to display some graphs on. Took a while to assemble the stand, hang the TV on that stand, but we got there.

So our site admin gets us a new HDMI cable. Coleague told us his lappy supports huge screens as he used to plug his home TV in his work lappy while WFHing. He grabs that HDMI, plugs one end into the screen, another - into his lappy and

.. nothing...
Windows does not recognize any new devices connected. The screen does not show any signs of any changes. Oh well..

Site IT admin installs all the updates, all the new drivers, upgrades BIOS and gives another try.

Nothing.

So naturally the cable is to blame. The port is working for him at home, so it's sure not port's fault. Also he uses his 2-monitor setup at work, so the port is 100% working!

I'm curious. What if..... While they are busy looking for another cable, I take that first one, plug it into my Linux (pretty much stock LinuxMint installation w/ X) lappy,

3.. 2.. 1..

and my desktop is now on the big ass 4k fat screen.

Folks. Enough bitching about Linux being picky about the hardware and Windows being more user friendly, having PnP and so. I'm not talking about esoteric devices. I'm talking about BAU devices that most of home users are using. A monitor, a printer, a TV screen, a scanner, wireless/usb speaker/mouse/keyboard/etc...
Linux just works. Face it

P.S. today they are still trying to make his lappy work with that TV screen. No luck yet.

New dev couldn't get his laptop set up and screens working. After a day struggling I walked over and recommend he plug in the power cord......

I'm 4 days into my new job, and so far I am absolutely loving it. Here's my setup. Yes, they gave me 3 monitors plus a laptop, so my setup has 5 screens! Now I can die happy :D

Definitely worth noting as well, since it caught me by surprise - the company-supplied laptop is a powerhouse. High-end i7 CPU, mid-to-high-end NVIDIA GPU, tons of ports, 1TB HD, 4K display, and 48 GB RAM. Yes, 48 GB. I am truly blessed, starting off my career with this. ^_^

Hardware of laptops today.
Displays: Glossy screens everywhere. "Hurr durr it has better colors". Idgaf what colors it has, when the only thing I can see is the wall behind me and my own reflection. Make it matte or get it out.
Touchpads: Bring back mechanical buttons. Haptic feedback dying with touchscreens/surfaces is a tragedy. "But we can have bigger touchpad area without buttons" ...why? the goal shouldn't be 1:1 touchpad vs. display ratio. It ain't a bloody tablet.
Docking stations: Some bright fucker figured out that they can utilize USB C. That thing keeps falling out with slightest laptop movement disconnecting all peripherals (guess why microUSB had those small hooks?). Also it doesn't have sufficient throughput, so the 5 years old dock can feed 3 full HD monitors just fine and the new one can't.
Keyboards: Personally I hate chiclet. And it's everywhere, because "apple has it so we must too". But the thing I hate even more is retardation of the arrow keys (up and down merged into size of one key), missing dedicated Home/End/PgDwn/PgUp buttons and somebody deciding the F keys are not needed and started replacing them with some multimedia bullshit.

My overall feeling is that this happens when you give the market to designers and customer demand. You end up with eye candy and useless fancy gadgets, with lowered ergonomy and worse features than previous generations of the same hardware. My laptop dying is my daily nightmare as I have no idea with what on the current market I would replace it.

The new mobile app codebase i'm working with, was clearly written by someone who just read a book on generics and encapsulation.

I need to pull out 2 screens into a separate library to have it shared around. The 1 networking request used is wrapped up in a 'WebServiceFactory' and `WebServiceObjectMapper`, used by a `NetworkingManager` which exposes a generic `request` method taking in a `TopLevelResponse` type (Which has imported every model) which uses a factory method to get the real response type.

This is needed by the `Router` which takes a generic `Action` which they've subclassed for each and every use case needing server communication.

Then the networking request function is part of a chain of 4 near identical functions spread across 4 different files, each one doing a tiny bit more than the last and casting everything to a new god damn protocol, because fuck concrete types.

Its not even used in that many places, theres like 6 networking calls. Why are people so god damn fucking stupid and insist on over engineering the shit out of their apps. I'm fed the fuck up with these useless skidmarks.

I managed to get a new dell XPS 15 with uhd display, 16GB RAM and a nice i7 for work.

My boss previously asked for advice from me for which laptop to get, he ignored my advice which was for him to get a nice surface book pro for his excel activities

Instead he got a shitty Mac book air (who are these people who like the airs?). As his cto I was upset he didn’t trust his tech guy to choose him a powerful laptop that was useful.

Anyway, he saw my new laptop this week and a contractor was admiring it. My boss then said why didn’t you tell me to get this one? (The surface pro is the same spec but with tablet and pen ability).

What a dick. I’m still mad he didn’t listen to me. And now he is saying I never told him.

Macs are shit btw. This dell is great and I don’t know how we lived without uhd screens before.

Debate (with rant-ish overtones):

FYI, while it is a debate, its a practiseSafeHex debate, which means there is a correct answer, i'm just interested in your responses/thoughts.

Ok lets kick off. So the remote team I work with had an opening for a new iOS developer (unrelated to anything to do with me). They interviewed and hired a guy based off his "amazing" take home challenge.

The challenge consists of 4 screens and was for a senior level position. For the challenge the interviewee created a framework (a iOS library) for each screen, included all the business logic for each screen inside, each one needs to be built separately, exposed some API/functions from each one and then created a main project to stitch it all together.

Now, my opinion is, this is highly unscalable and a ridiculous approach to take as it would add so much unnecessary overhead, for no benefit (I am correct btw).

The interviewee said he did it like this to "show off his skills and to stand out". The remote team loved it and hired him. The challenge said "show us the code standard you would be happy to release to production". I would argue that he has only demonstrated 1 extra skill, and in exchange delivered something that is unscalable, going to be a nightmare to automate and require huge on-boarding and a paradigm shift, for no reason. To me thats a fail for a senior to not realise what he's doing. This person will be required to work alone (in part), make architecture decisions, set the foundation for others etc. Having someone who is willing to just do mad shit to show off, is really not the type of person suited to this role.

Debate!

Two weeks into our fresh new Android app my colleague decided to define 1dp dimension unit in dimens.xml:
<dimen name="dimen_1dp">1dp</dimen>

During my code review I asked him if there was no better name for it as it's simply overstating the obvious and does not scale well for other resolutions. He didn't understand what I meant so I said would you then define this for xxdpi
<dimen name="dimen_1dp">4dp</dimen> just because you need more padding on higher density screens?

Then he goes on for 10 minutes how he thought about other names (doesn't say which ones) and still decided to stick with this one.

I politely heard him out and made it abundantly clear that I disagree with that naming (not the value). And I also backed up my point by saying that what he did is exactly the same as defining a color in colors.xml like this:
<color name="color_FFFFFF">#FFFFFF</color>

Then he frowned and said (paraphrasing): Noooooooo, that is so wrong. I would never do that. It's not the same as what I have done.
Then he again started defending his point which probably would have gone for good 10 minutes except I literally bit my tongue and walked away from my desk hoping he wouldn't follow as I was dangerously close to punching him!

Fucking enganeers!!!

My Task: Create a new application in a custom C#-Framework, to replace screens from the old application.
Me:Fine.
The old application has a Java Frontend.
Me:Fine.
The old application has an Oracle-DB.
Me:Fine.
The old application has its logic fully on the DB.
Me:What ??
You cannot connect to the DB via ODBC.
Me:But why ???
You cannot use external libraries, just our framework.
Me: For what are you thinking i can use to call the functions on the DB
You have to use a custom connection-bus which uses JDBC
Me:Fine.
This connection-bus cannot call SQL Statements and return the result.
Me:WTF, how should i get the data out of the Database ?
We don't know find a way.
Me:Ahh fuck off.

~2 years ago:

Me: Managed to figure out how to port that library. Just need designs and then we can build feature X. I've tested it in ugly developer-y screens. It works fully

Boss: Thats awesome, saw the video, looks great. This is a really important feature, thanks for looking into this

~1.5 years ago:

Me: Ok i've started working on the designs, just FYI we don't have designs for feature X

Boss: Ok, must have slipped, noted

~1 year ago:

Me: I've seen more posts about users wanting apps with features X in it. Still don't have designs, we working on that?

Boss: I'll check with design

~3 Months ago:

Boss: Ok were going to have to get serious about pulling features out and reducing MVP so we can get this out there. I think feature A, D, Y and X have to be dropped for v1. Theres too much left to do on them

Me: sure

~1 week ago:

Boss: We need to start getting ready for xxxxx. Can you do me a favour and start writing up some developer docs etc, kind of like this one we did for this other project

This morning opening my emails from last night:

Boss: I've reviewed the doc, looks good, only minor things need tweaking. Let me ask you something though, you said feature X was pulled out and its "pending design work". Its not only pending design work is it? Is it that far along?

==========
What I actually replied:

Yes ... i've sent you videos of it functional in the past, and discussed this ... more than once. Just design ... and some testing of the new designs obviously

==========
What that meant:

Yes. May god have mercy on your soul if you reply anything even remotely close to "oh I had no idea, lets revisit adding this to v1". I will not be held accountable for my actions

We work in an office where we must lock our computer screens because our screens may have confidential information on them, plus you could do things as the person without taking any blame (ie sending an email).
Anyways anytime someone forgets to lock their screen we always prank them pretty hard. The greatest thing we ever did was in our latest release we had our managers buy us drinks at the pub. Well our managers left to go to the pub and one of them forgot to lock their computers. So we downloaded an image of the blue screen of death and made it full screen, unplugged his mouse and keyboard for added effect, and locked his computer. He came in the next Monday and couldn't log in because his keyboard wouldn't work. He actually called IT to bring him a new keyboard and mouse... then he unlocked his computer and freaked out with the IT guy because there was the blue screen of death. Needless to say he got a brand new computer as well as a new mouse and keyboard.

I'd call it a win win?

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

Four years ago while still a newbey in Android Dev and still using the eclipse IDE which was hell to configure by adding Android plugins,my girlfriend had a birthday.
With my new found love of coding thought of developing a b-day app for her.With so little android knowledge I had a great idea the main activity would have her photo as the background and button which when clicked would show a toast saying happy b-day love.
After spending few minutes in Tutorial point and learning how to display a toast and setting click listeners on buttons I was good to go and compiled the app.

Later that evening I head to her room where her b-day was to be held with some of her lady friends .When presenting gifts I presented her gift said had one more surprise for her and asked for her phone and using bluetooth sent the apk to her phone.
Installing the app I was scared to death on seeing how my grey buttons were displaying on her 2.7 screen size since had no idea on designing for multiple screens.
Giving her back the phone she loved the app and felt like her superman in the room though not for long.Her lady friends had gone ahead took her phone and were critising the app:
Why can't I take a selfie
Why can't the app play a b-day song for her and this went on them not knowing how hurting that was.
Bumped on the lady who lead the onslaught on me and had to go down memory lane.Life is a journey.

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.

During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.

For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!

Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.

The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.

The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.

It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.

Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.

Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.

Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.

From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.

Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".

On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".

To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.

Quote:

> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.

– Jake Archibald, 2013

Here's an issue I've been having with my PC for the past year;

*gets blue screen of death* (every 5 mins)
*takes out my second pair of ram cards, blue screening stops*
*waits a day, puts cards back in, has no more problems for 1-2 weeks*
*gets more blue screens*
*repeats*
If I leave the cards out, the system NEVER has any issues.
But, I can't play games smoothly on 4gb of ram.
Also, I can't afford new cards.

I just broke 2 phones in two days... believe it or not... Both screens cracked and no swipe functionality survived...

I miss my fucking Nokia Lumia 930... that motherfucker was almost fully destroyed, screen cracked as shit, I could actually hold the screen on one hand and the rest of the phone on the other and it was still fucking working...

Needless to say, I'm going to Amazon and I'm getting a new Nokia phone, fuck LG, fuck Sony.

Started a new job, spent a week staring at loading screens :|

I don't mind Apple marketing themselves as these revolutionary thinkers and innovators, because I figured most people see behind the marketing but appreciate Apple for what it is. It's a big company that makes well built products, that are efficient and give good support to those products.

But I'm sick to death of tech journalists talking about how every new feature is the death of Android. They have to be kidding themselves if they think what Apple's doing is innovating. Samsung's been designing screens for the bezelless market for a LONG time, and their technology in that is incredibly advanced (it's why if you use their iPhone x you'll be looking at a screen from Samsung!)

They finally adopted wireless charging and pretended it was brand new, but I remember when they came out with the Apple watch, marketing it like they'd broken ground when Android Wear watches had been out for a year!

I don't want people to think I hate Apple, I own a few of their products. I think they're remarkably invested in user privacy; homekit imo is one of the most forward thinking implementations of smart home technology that I've seen, and the new processor in the iPhone x is a Mammoth powerhouse. So, I'm not necessarily saying anything about that, but what I am saying is that they're iñcredible at marketing, but fanboys but are not self-aware can enough to recognize when the Designed-by-Apple hype over shadows the actual objectivity or the situation. There are articles already talking about Apple's wireless charging.

TL;DR I swear to god if an apple fanboy comes at me saying the bezelless design was Apple's innovation, I'm going to snap. I appreciate what Apple does well, but unfortunately people can't appreciate a product without needing to identify with it.

The new CTO promised us better coffee in his introduction meeting. Honestly felt pretty trivial and part of his used car salesman pitch to us.

A month goes buy and he replaces our shitty drip Starbucks breakfast blend coffee with ... Starbucks coffee machines. I shit you not these things have touch screens on them. So I tried two cups of each bean type and ... this stuff is really really bad. It's literally worse than the drip brew. It's so fucking terrible I have trouble finishing a cup.

God damn it!

Story time.

I worked on a project recently where the HTML was written just _perfectly_. Div elements were exactly indented as the blocks on the browser window.

CSS classes were self explanatory and altering them didn't introduce any new kind of bug on the browser window.

Introducing a new div block with CSS classes fit perfectly in the window along with responsiveness on different screens.

JS was also written in a self explanatory way.

It was such an Italian Chef's kiss grade of work that I just sat back and admired the glorious work for 10 mins. Totally deserved it.

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

I work as a .Net consultant. Currently I am at a company that blocks all sociale media sites and sites that look like 'em. I don't mind the social media, but YouTube is also blocked and I need my dose of daily epic music world while developing. So, I set up a proxy on my server to easily bypass these blockades. Note: company policy says nothing about not being allowed certain websites, I always read this before using this trick.

Last week, a new guy joined the company and gets a desk just next to me. After a lot of looking at my screens and trying stuff he asks me for the entire office: "Hey how are you going on YouTube? It doesn't see to work for me.". 😫

The rest of the day, I had to explain to co-workers what a proxy is (they don't care about any tech they don't need...). And I had to explain to the pm that I was not hacking their network...

I'm not sure if I will be getting along with this new guy.... 😧

ideal sprint fallacy.
total days 10 , total hours(excluding breaks ) 8 hrs per day= 80 hrs per dev

code freeze day = day 8, testing+ fixing days : 8,9,10. release day : day 10
so ideal dev time = 7days/56 hr
meetings= - 1hr per day => 49 hrs per dev

- 1 day for planning i.e d1 . so dev time left . 6 days 42 hrs.
-----------
all good planning. now here comes the messups

1. last release took some time. so planning could not happen on d1. all devs are waiting. . devtime = 5 days 35 hrs.

2. during planning:
mgr: hey devx what's the status on task 1?
d: i integrated mock apis. if server has made the apis, i will test them .
mgr : server says the apis are done. whats your guestimate for the task completion?
d : max 1-2 hrs?
m : cool. i assign you 4 hrs for this. now what about task 2?
d : task told to me is done and working . however sub mgr mentioned that a new screen will be added. so that will take time
m : no we probably won't be taking the screen. what's your giestimate?
d : a few more testing on existing features. maybe 1-2 hrs ?
m: cool
another 4 hrs for u. what about task 3?
d : <same story>
m : cool. another 4 hrs for u. so a total of 12 hrs out of 35 hrs? you must be relaxed this sprint.
d : yeah i guess.
m cool.
-------
timelines.
d1: wasted i previous sprint
d2 : sprint planning
d3 : 3+ hrs of meetings, apis for task 1 weren't available sub manager randomly decided that yes we can add another screen but didn't discussed. updates on all 3 tasks : no change in status
d4 : same story. dev apis starts failing so testing comes to halt.
d5 : apis for task1 available . task 3 got additional improvement points from mgr out of random. some prod issue happens which takes 4+ hrs. update on tasks : some more work done on task 3, task 1 and 2 remains same.
d6 : task1 apis are different from mocks. additionally 2 apis start breaking and its come to know thatgrs did not explain the task properly. finally after another 3+ hrs of discussion , we come to some conclusions and resolutions
d7 : prod issue again comes. 4+ hrs goes into it . task 2 and 3 are discussed for new screen additiona that can easily take 2+ days to be created . we agree tot ake 1 and drop 2nd task's changes i finish task 2 new screens in 6 hrs , hoping that finally everything will be fine.

d8 : prod issue again comes, and changes are requested in task 2 and 3

day 9 build finally goes to tester
day 10 first few bugs come with approval for some tasks
day 11(day 1 of new sprint) final build with fixes is shared. new bugs (unrelated to tasks. basically new features disguised as bugs) are raised . we reject and release the build.

day 2 sprint planning
mgr : hey dev x, u had only 12 hrs of work in your plate. why did the build got delayed?

🥲🫡

Haven't ranted for awhile but here it goes...
In a meeting with a front end user yesterday. They don't like the entry screens on our Oracle ERP system. They want us to provide them with a tool so they can create new entry screens to replace those they dont like. They want full autonomy over that tool and no interference from IT. Oh, and they want unfettered database access to the production data, including full ability to execute DML. I so wanted to say 'Are you high?'.

A: Please build a Website for our new product.
A: Please use fancy technology, Animations and stuff!
B: OK, but $_things won't Work on mobile
A: mobile is Not our target audience. No Problem, optimize it for big Screens only.
B: it's 2017 - we need a mobile optimized Page, are u sure?
A: yes, so what i say

A week later...

B: hey a, here is Your preview. Optimized for big Screens, and i didn't Care much about mobile.

A: HEY B, YOU NEED TO FIX $FUNCTIONS ASAP!! THEY DON'T WORK ON MOBILE

You know what you shouldnt do? Leave your bag with your work laptop at the stairs.

Woke up as normal today and helped the kids down the stairs without checking. Then I just heard how I stepped on something.

Lets say its a big crack in the middle of the screen and you see shit. But gladly it work with work with external screens so its just the screen that are damaged. So tomorrow I must either:

- Work as normal with an external monitor and simply wait to call the boss for fix until after christmas.

- Or call the boss and tell him how stupid I am and hope its okay and I van get a new one/fix this.

Right now I feel for the first one.

So me and some colleagues joined a hackathon. We already agreed on our project architecture, UI design, and features to build and showcase. Halfway through development new features kept getting added without my inputs, I said to myself it's ok maybe they're just small insertions. But nope, they kept breaking my CSS and UI design and kept causing merge issues on our repo because, well, no one could seem to agree on the project scope. The last straw was, with a couple of hours left, someone went and added new screens and changed the application flow entirely, which entailed some rather nasty rework of my code to fix. Fuck that, I decided to just stop and let them sort the mess.

When it was our turn to present our project, the fucking cunts assumed I would do all the talking - even if they never sent over the slides they put together. Why the fuck am I going to present something drastically different from the initial, agreed-upon scope? I told them to do it themselves and I remained silent throughout the entire debacle.

Of course, we lost. But I wasn't surprised. The guys who presented kept on contradicting each other and were not unified in their vision. I'm never teaming up with them ever again. Fucking asshole douchebag fucks.

Is there such thing as enough screens?

Just got a new one, which is like twice the size of my older 2nd screen and Im still pulling things to my laptop screen...

Hopefully, you already know that the company controlled by the alledged reptiloid subhuman and olimpic testicle juggler formerly known as Mister Zuck My Tits is not to be trusted.

But as is always the case in this bitch, I've been forced into cowjizz flooded swamps' worth of stinking shit platforms for the sake of avoiding isolation.

And so, I've just found yet another way in which Facebook **THUNDERSTRIKE** ... the company, not the geriatric ward, is one of the CROWN ACHIEVEMENTS of human civilization.

Let me tell you something: some people are fucking broke. Hell, some people sleep on the streets, live on scraps, and willingly engage in acts of public defecation when provoked. But I'm not even talking about them no, just plain *broke*.

And so imagine being that guy who doesn't really use his phone much, except maybe for sharing cat pictures with mom because that's what being an absolute chad is all about. You don't get a new phone, because money is a __little__ bit tight. But THEN...

The dreaded CAPITAL strikes, and requests of you to bend and fall onto your knees so as to provide intense, intimate and manual -- as well as oral -- PLEASURE to the [NOT SO] METAPHORICAL PENIS of the """SYSTEM""".

Oh, what an abominable, drooooooling revenant that lies before you!

"Gimme your ass... " he says, menacingly, as you wail about in a futile attempt to guard and preserve the very last vestiges of your own anal virginity.

And so you fight, and kick him in the NADS with everything you have, down to the final shreds of vigor. Victory! Or so you thought...

"You must... " he mutters, mortally wounded "update WhatsApp... "

"Still you breathe?!" you exclaim, suddenly transformed into a heroic, sexy moustachoed arquebusier "After I'm done ~OILING~ my VICTORIOUS CHEST, I *shall* bestow DEATH uppon you!".

But as you rip open your shirt to apply sensual oiling to your marvellous frontal assets, your nemesis reveals it's portentous Portugal: "this new version of Android... " he gasps as he perishes "is incompatible with your device... "

"Ughh! Sacrebleu!" you shriek out in pain, realizing that you are now unable to ACCESS THE FUCKING DATA THAT IS IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HARDWARE BECAUSE OF A STUPID FORCED BINARY INCOMPATIBILITY.

That's right. Now even if I *do* get a new phone, I can't do shit about losing all of the family memes. And contacts and all of that shit, but the stickers are more important. A minor inconvenience, yes, and it didn't need all of this preamble but I was doing the dramatic fight scene bit inside my head as I was writing and I got into it.

Because the only documented way to transfer all of that data is to OPEN THE APPLICATION and scan some code, but everytime I go to do that, IT TELLS ME I NEED TO UPDATE. And every time I GO TO UPDATE, it says that MY PHONE is TOO FUCKING OLD!! AAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!!!!

And you too, might be a dashing french man from centuries past, with both balls and tits down to your fucking knees, folding your arms in a position that exhumes smugness in a disgustingly irreverent and self-aggrandizing way, looking at me as a mere plebeian who cannot wrap his head around the mystical art of interacting with Google's black deuce box.

And you would be somewhat right in your judgement! But just having to fiddle about with these fucking pocket Elmo screens is such a traumatic experience for me that I'd rather lose my stickers.

[ADBREAK] Are you a debonair victorian undercover butt pirate, taking unparalleled care of your Falstaffian, highfalutin poils pubiens? Need your "sword" sharpened, as you browse through the pages of this magnanimous lexicon? Would you rather allocate final death to your coworkers than learn one more synonym for sonorous, supercilious and pontifical?

We all know that ALL you need to help keep that honor intact is slaying your enemies in high-stakes combat. But how to satisfy less gallant needs, when male prostitution is outlawed in more than sixteen duchies?

Look no further than BloodCurse, the ancient hex that will haunt your family for countless generations! With BloodCurse, you may crawl the earth as a mindless, shameless, piece of shit cockswallowing JUGGERNAUT that craves nothing BUT the consumption of scabbed human ass!

BloodCurse is easily contracted through consumption of the GENITAL fluids of highly-lecherous succubi, conjured through [EXTREMELY CENSORED]! This forbidden arcana allows the user to debour HIS OWN testicles in no time!

Get your bottle of scents, sensual Portuguese chest oils, and fucking designer-drug bath salts for the low, low price of a passionate, unceassing self-blowjob! And use my code FRONTALASSETS for 60% OFF in your next soul-robbing foray into the felational dark arts!

Big ups to BloodCurse for sponsoring this RRRRRRRR~$RRR$$RR%5RRRRR$0000:>A48CC50A E3A1B22A : 330D4750 7C24E5A5|.......*3.GP|$.. 5262E7D5 0D1C24E6 : 85594B39 1CB7593E|Rb......YK9..Y>

:~

Ok. I am trying out a new thing. My colleague told me about a technique worth giving a shot. So basically you should ignore the negative things and only focus on the positive ones making your mind shift states and boost your productivity although sometimes really hard. It’s working for me quite well so far, so here’s my two cents on today:

Thank you my dear designer fellow to making all the screens more beautiful than they were already. Big respect for you for not worrying about deadlines and for for inspiring me to be a faster programmer. I knew I can count on you. Being such nice to me leaves me speechless sometimes, but not today. Today I wish you soon get all the anusroses to smell right next to your beautiful face

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

So we started a new Unity video game project for mobile in June 2021. Hooray!

Being a mobile project, one of the earliest things we think about is scaling the interface across all sorts of device screen resolutions and aspect ratios, right? Well, to preemptively solve this problem early on, I decided to letterbox the game view - just choose one aspect ratio for the game and pad black bars to the sides of the screen. Simple, solves the game's world space problem without trying too hard, and it automatically adapts to Android's split-screen mode.

I showed the early builds to management as well as game design team and they gave me some general nods. Sounds like green light ahead. I spent the next few months building the game logic and scale the UI around a consistent letterboxed game view. If you had experience scaling Unity UI to a letterboxed area, you should already knew that it takes a whole paradigm of its own that's kinda hard to break out of, but the fact that it stays consistent across all screen aspect ratios is so worth it. Regardless, the biggeer benefit of letterboxing is simpler world space setup. You don't worry about whether this particular area will be overflowed horizontally or vertically in a particular device or not. You have a 9:16 window to view the world through, nothing needs to move at runtime and that's about it.

Fast-forward to early September 2021 and 40+ builds later, the GD started having concern that the playing area is not filling up his phone screen and that the letterboxes are bothering him. He wants to get rid of the letterboxes and wants the game world as well as UI to fill up his screen.

Yes. After 40+ builds, for all of which the letterbox was present, nobody in the project raised a concern about the letterbox. It's only NOW that they all of the sudden side with the GD and demand the removal of the letterbox. I feel like almost half of my effort on this game has been wasted. These clueless guys didn't spend one second looking at the early builds thinking of the possibility that the black bars at the top and bottom of their phone screens (which I repeat: has been around since the very first build) is gonna bother them? Somebody must be playing a cruel joke at this company. They had all the chances to bring this up as a potential issue and TODAY is the first time I hear of it.

See, designers. You waste our time and your time by doing this kind of thing. Please raise your issues early. Complain to us ASAP. If you wait for so long before raising an issue that has been in-your-face the whole time, I can't fault any developer for assuming you're trying to play a long prank. I can tell designers right now: it's not funny.

I need guidance about my current situation.
I am perfectionist believing in OOP, preventing memory leak in advance, following clean code, best practices, constantly learning about new libraries to reduce custom implementation & improve efficiency.
So even a single bad variable name can trigger my nerves.

I am currently working in a half billion $ IT service company on a maintenance project of 8 year old Android app of security domain product of 1 of the top enterprise company of the world, which sold it to the many leading companies in the world in Govt service, banking, insurance sectors.

It's code quality is such a bad that I get panic attacks & nightmares daily.

Issues are like
- No apk obfuscation, source's everything is openbook, anybody can just unzip apk & open it in Android Studio to see the source.
- logs everywhere about method name invoked,
- static IV & salt for encryption.
- thousands of line code in God classes.
- Irrelevant method names compared to it's functionality.
- Even single item having list takes 2-3 seconds to load
- Lag in navigation between different features' screens.
- For even single thing like different dimension values for different density whole 100+ lines separate layout files for 6 types of densities are written.
- No modularized packages, every class is in single package & there are around 100+ classes.

Owner of the code, my team lead, is too terrified to change even single thing as he don't have coding maturity & no understanding of memory leak, clean code, OOP, in short typical IT 'service' company mentality.

Client is ill-informed or cost-cutting centric so no code review done by them in 8 years.

Feeling much frustrated as I can see it's like a bomb is waiting to blast anytime when some blackhat cracker will take advantage of this.

Need suggestions about this to tackle the situation.

what the fuck I can't edit the rant after 5 minutes I am fucking posting a new rant which have that last rant ...Why they update the fucking x code in every fucking 15 days . Well some libraries are deprecated oh cool I can use my shit as an object. And why third party libraries don't provide some good documentation of their sdk's . What the fuck is that and I will personally kill auto layout by entering in the mac myself. What is the use of that fucking debugging tool if I know don't the crap of my code that in which class I have done something terribly wrong what the fuck . Oh cool I am having that clang error and I don't know how to wipe my ass. And please fucking don't tell me to use xib code in xcode for my project if there will be 600 screens I will still fucking use storyboard for that. I don't fuck with xib files do you hear me. And fucking stackoverflow ..what the fuck is wrong if I forget an single comma during posting a question ..what the fuck..and you know what the real feeling is when I post a issue on stackoverflow and I got nothing from them expect some minus points...and then the holy fucking coder inside me tells me to solve that fucking problem and I feel like having dope bitch. FUCCKKKK..

Working on a project to create a space Invaders clone using Android studio/java. Point is to prove teamwork and our ability to optimise for a phone.

Leader makes the engine
Passes code to me who is doing gameplay.
Creating classes, testing them with a temporary activity class to get them on screen.
Okay, time to get it going properly.
Starts creating the game by placing aliens to the screen via the new alien manager, created in the true starting place.
Nothing appears on screen, sounds still play.
Odd. Repeatedly try to fix, but objects will not appear on the screen if created outside of temporary activity.
Show problem to leader as I haven't been able to figure out.
Gets lectured to no end about how I can't just ask him for help (first fucking time) if I get stuck!!!
Turns out, the value for frame time is way off for the first frame, and their positions get going way off the screens range when being placed. Temp activity works as it skips first frame.
Why did this happen? Genius leader didn't properly initialise it, so first frame time was equal to the First Date Object time ever locked - current time 🤔🤔🤔
We figured it out together.

So Ive to make new screens in xaml in combination with C# (WPF)

So I had something like this in the codebehind
titleBox.Text = Properties.Resources.someKey

The resources looks like
<data name="someKey">
<value>some text</value> <!-- this is some comment --> <!-- and another one -->
</data>

The title got as value "and another one", when I removed it it became "this is some comment" removing that resulted in the value "some text"

in my previous company , we used to create 4 custom ui states for just 1 screen in android app, and we would have task to create 3-4 new feature screens in 1 sprint (of 14 days) the states would be :

empty state : a state where data is not available. usually consisted of message, a graphic and some action button

data state : the usual state where data is filled on various elements

loading : a shimmer ui showing loading. it was supposed to be pixel perfect to that of the data state. it was basically a different xml, but with grey colored views instead of colorful. the tricky part would usually he to create the dynamic views

error/no connection state : as most of the screens couldbget api error or no internet error, this would be the screen for asking user to retry connection

all of these screens combined with their ui in xmls + kotlin code with barely any stuff being reusable , made the life incredibly difficult. however a lot of our customers would appreciate the interactivity of our app

doing these stuff again nd again , i had become trained to do all those 3-4 (x4) screens and the whole ui stuff in first 4 days of the sprint. but now i am in a company where i am getting passed on to managers after managers and getting tasks to change documentation in 1 week, i find those coding stuff incredibly tough.

gotta get back to shape

After I was woken up in the morning by my friend that had a meeting nearby.
We went for coffee and as part of usual Wednesday I also decided to go to cinema to see Dr Dollitle ( not verry funny ).

I felt relaxed as everyone fucked off from me since Monday.

I was so happy of doing nothing after the movie I decided to try to make both frontend and backend for new application screens in finite time.

I could have waited for frontend developer to be back from his vacation but since I can also do it I decided to do it myself.

I did frontend part first with mock data and after finishing it before 2 pm asked if client will have time to discuss it. He didn’t so we decided I try to add real data and publish it on test environment.

Well those are mock up screens anyway so I decided to eat and smoke to chill but also try to work anyway.

I just finished backend for those screens and switched test environment to new branch.
Looks like they’re working for biggest client customers.

Usually it takes about a week or two to describe frontend developer what client wants but let’s see if I still have some frontend UX empathy left and can speed up development by couple of days.

Build my own phone and support the Zerophone project by writing code.

Seriously what the fuck is going on with the development of major companies smartphones. Every year all there is are larger displays, better and more cameras, faster processors and some more 'AI' thrown into the mix.

What the heck am I supposed to do with a phone costing multiple hundreds of euros but locked down with an OS spying on you. The processing power available is hardly ever used because most people just use apps like Instagram, WhatsApp or other messaging services.

I get why larger screens are useful but at some point it gets ridiculous.
Better cameras are useful to some degree as well but there's a limit to it.
If you really want to get into photographing then please buy an actual camera.

Another aspect I'd of course like to talk about is privacy. It's hardly existent on IOS or Android smartphones with Google services. Of course one can install different ROMs like Lineage OS but if I already pay multiple hundreds for a device then I'd prefer it working for and not against me.

And dare you break a single part of your phone. You can't really repair it yourself anymore and one can't even change its battery. Most people either have it repaired or just buy a new one and throw it away. There is so much electronic waste, very difficult and expensive to dispose of, just buried in the ground somewhere.

Summing up: I don't really know where the development of smartphones is heading. A phone is a device you carry around with you almost everyday so I'd like it to be tailored to me and not spy on me.

I hope the Librem phone will be a success and other open source phone projects will gain more attention. I want a phone I can repair myself and tailor the software running on it to my needs. I'd like to write messages, listen to music, make calls, run a WiFi hot-spot on the phone and maybe play some tiny games on it once in a while.

I wanted to work on my new project this weekend, Friday I started good with a case of beer, chips and... fell asleep. Saturday I started good as well then breakfast happened and evening ended with shots. Today is sunday and I started fresh with deleting and fixing the drunk code from previous days. 2 screens made and 20 lines of code, pretty good weekend.

random writing on wall : "new mcDonalds burger for just Rs 99/-" (* 10% GST)
me : "oh that's easy. 99+ 10% of 99 = 9.9 , so total will be 108.9
---
random DSA question in interview : "given a number n, write a program to break it into n parts, such that product of all parts is the highest for given number n. like for 10, 4x3x3 is 36, 4x3x2x1 is24, 5x5 is 25, and thus the correct answer is 4x3x3"

me : 💀💀💀🏳️🏳️🏳️🏳️

-----
seriously though why the fuck is this programming so difficult. I also learnt java c++ python and various languages during my education days, and currently using it to create awesome buttons and ui screens which is being used by millions of people,

but why the interviewers have to ask questions that results in such a horrific use of these beautiful languages!?!

these non realistic stuff are not at all intuitive and will only result in people who likes to mug up these questions and their solutions to keep winning in life

My job is introducing a new system to (legally) avoid some taxes for the employees and get then more netto compensation. But in the meantime, they have removed all benefits of having a (free) home office. No free screens, no free chair, no free keyboard/mouse, ...

So I've received a link to Figma for the new mobile app from our designer. It looks great and all but...

Each fucking piece of text is styled independently. Half of the cards in the layout are simple rounded rectangles, the other half are some components with a gradient. Icons are a mix of vector graphics and line elements. Even buttons aren't components. Consistence anyone? Please?

And now comes the best part. How am I even supposed to reach half of the screens? There are four variants of a screen with very similar functionality, but only a single button in the main screen which would at least remotely correspond to one of them. The guy who invented the wirescreens just kept adding things which would be nice to have in the final app, without revising it and making clear use case flows out of it?

After a few days of implementing this clusterfuck of a design, I have finally settled on a consistent set of font and element themes. Just please use components in Figma. You are paid to work in this tool which can make it super easy for the developer AND for you as well to make the design come to life, so why don't you learn to use it?

At least the designer is a nice guy, but god, could he learn to use his single tool?

For our product there is a common type of bug we get reported. It is not really a bug, also it is not a feature - instead it is a missing or incomplete feature.

For example to help users we add a search feature on one screen, but there is no search on some other screen. Now the absence of search on that screen is apparently a bug.

To make things worse to report the bug users try to trick us. They say something like:
"Hey can you help me? How can I find things in the abc screen?"

So I explain how to browse for the item or whatever.

Then they say:
"Ok now how do you do that on the xyz screen?"

Slightly suspiciously I now tell them how you can browse for the item like before or we have this new feature eg. search you can use if that is quicker.

Now they say:
"Don't you think it would be better to have that search on the first screen?"

OK now I realize this is just a trick and the person doesn't actually need help using the software. So I tell him how we only added the feature on one screen and if he thinks there is value adding it on other screens he can put enhancement request in and if wants he can talk to my boss about making it a priority.

Then they go on asking other rhetorical questions like:
"why was it designed like this?"
"Are you guys deliberately trying to make life harder for people by making them learn different ways to do things?"

I now want to delete the new search feature but luckily it is close to lunch time so I have a good excuse to escape the conversation.

Developer's frustration..

I currently don't have the space (believe it or not) to accommodate two screens onto my desk.
I've been developing on a single 15" laptop for years (since 2010).

I'm getting tired of constantly having to switch between windows. lol.

Mmmmust figure out wayyyy to incorporate new screen into my setupppp. lol

My programming paradigms unit has decided to explore different teaching/learning environments by creating lecture/workshops. Imagine a massive room with big projector screens at the front and smaller screens lined up against the wall at the back. The lecture room seats are designed around tables that are gradually elevated so it’s similar to a lecture hall but you’re sitting at discussion tables.

There’s the usual lecture with all the slides up around everywhere, there’s nice wheelie chairs and dimmer lighting... can’t tell if we’re at a conference or some awards night. Then all of a sudden, we’re coding in teams (tables) and uploading our work on to forums to discuss with the rest of the lecture hall. WHAAAAAAAT

Really different and quite enjoyable experience, there’s more than one tutor walking around to help, there’s mics for people to present.

Just sharing my new experience of forward learning environments that didn’t cause feelings of anxiousness for once or boredom. It was kind of mind blowing, wish it was always like this.

Is there a mockup/authoring system for linux that I can use to mockup gui interfaces? I want to be able to create pages of screens with button that link to other pages. I first want to use this to document out current app. Then I want to use it to create a new version so that others can review the approach I want to take.

I am first looking at libreoffice because you can draw primitives very easy. It has a scripting backend as well. I had used authoring systems years ago (20 years) on old black and white macs. I have not seen systems like that in a while. Searching for authoring systems for linux brings up a lot of web based ones. I don't want to mock it up on web if I can help it, but it could work if it did relative links to html files in the same directory. That way any browser would work.

I really just don't know what the state of the art tools used for this. Probably using terms I don't recognize.

There was this one time when we've managed to upload a Debug build to Google Play Store.

On the same day we had to create a new build w/ fixes, have the testers perform smoke tests, then switch to some fairly quick overall tests.

If nothing were to come up during those tests, the build was supposed to be passed over to the submission manager for release.

Things weren't going that smoothly in the beginning, w/ the first two builds being broken in one way or another.

Finally, however, we managed to create a properly working build.

QA hadn't had that much time to test it, but no major problems were identified && given the deadline we had to submit it.

The next workday it turned out that the tester responsible for passing the approved build over to the submission manager gave him the Debug build.

The submission manager none the wiser uploaded that build for release.

Result?

The users who managed to update their game got their save data wiped... sort of.

It looked that way given the Debug build was communicating w/ a different server.

In the aftermath of that situation, we had to repair the damage && upload the correct build as quickly as possible.

Also, ever since then a huge text 'DEBUG' was added to the loading screens of Debug builds to make people very aware of which build they were looking at.

As for any repercussions for the tester responsible for the mess, or the submission manager - I have no idea.

They were both still working there, so at the very least none of them got fired because of this.

I feel like i am being forced to own a shitty module in our codebase.
It was developed by previous owners and they made a frankenstien monster out of it: Its one part of codebase that is very huge, does not follow the code standards, is making complex kinds of api calls and using very niche components. It gets bugs once in a while BUT IT WORKS.

It fuckin works and is one of the important steps before customer purchases a company product, so kinda part of revenue generation flow.

But this module was never a part of our codebase which we would usually touch. it was owned by another team, they would add enhancements , new features to it and fix the bugs .

When i joined the team, i was once asked to help those guys as a "resource" because they wanted to get something shipped and were low on bandwidth. So i just worked on one of the screens, added a small bugifx and voila, task is done and am back to other part of the app.

But now out of random, they decided to pass on the ownership to ur team, gave a small KT which didn't really explained a lot of actual codebase, but rather the business functionality of it(and that too poorly). And my TL is saying that i should own it because "I worked on that module before"

I don't know how to deal with this frankenstien monster. Earlier a bug came and i was out of my wits to understand why this bug came. their logging is weird and not explaining a lot, their backend devs help provide aws logs but those aren't very helpful either .

the best i could do was declare that their technical approach is wrong and we should modify it, but that idea was quickly squashed.

ITs quite possible that company isn't going to change this module or add any new features further. but everytime a bug would come, i would be getitngfrustrated looking at their frankenstien monster

Welp. I think I witnessed a new job application hack. Someone listed my team’s general engineering email address for their Employee Referral.

That email address is listed publicly, but I’m pretty sure no one on my team told the applicant to list it as a referral contact. I suspect someone got the email from a Slack workspace. I had posted a job listing, in a threaded comment someone had complimented my employer’s public API, and I shared our engineering email and said we’d love to see what he builds.

It looks like someone else from that Slack saw this and decided to list the engineering email as an employee referral. I get that employee referral can mean different things to different people and it might be someone who’s new to job searching and doesn’t know better.

For my employer’s online application, an employee referral requires a name and email address for the employee. I’m curious what the applicant listed for the employee referrer’s name. Wonder if it was my name. If it is, guess I have to give my manager a heads up and tell him that I do not know this applicant.

This occurrence is a new one for me and I don’t think it’s happened to us before. And it’s not really a good tactic to get a resume read at my workplace. Where I work, my manger reviews the resumes and tells HR who he wants to set up calls with. It’s not HR or an ATS that screens resumes and sends them to my manager.

My team leader (Indian) asked me, in my second month in the job, to estimate the required time for testing some screens.
I made the estimations based on my experience and understanding of "screen testing" then discussed it with him and he accepted the estimations.
When the time came to start the task, he sent me a document about writing automation test for the screens,which was new thing to me.
The task took more than the estimations (3 times) and I have been blamed because I made wrong estimations.
The team leader was the one who blamed me!!!
Never estimate a task without full description...

Am I the only one who thinks that Apple loves fucking over its developers? Besides for the yearly fee, they seem to release iPhones with drastically different screen dimensions, which forces devs to make their apps compatible with a new layout. I can't imagine the nightmare this causes for devs of games, which often have custom UIs.

First we have the change to a taller screen dimension for absolutely no fucking reason, then there was a display size increase, and now there's curved corners and the top of the display extends on both sides but not the middle.

That last bit must make for some really fucked up design decisions. Who the fuck thought that a partial screen would be a good idea? Screens would cost a ton more and would be substantially harder to replace. Not to mention how screen protectors will be less likely to stay on...

IMO this is just as bad as Android version fragmentation. 😒

#justathought

What do people need? What will be the requirements of future?
App development, webdev, blockchain,.. snapchat, tiktok, insta... These are all just careers and apps whose sole purpose is to engage people with their phones... Every new app/website in the market wants to make the youngest of the young and oldest of the old to keep their eyes fixed on this glass screen for as long as they can... For the current decade, this has been the most successful market and profitable scheme of business in the world, leaving other careers like medical, astronomy, mechanics., Etc far behind.

So is this the future? In the next generation too we will be having users who are addicted to smaller and smaller and larger and larger screens, with their spectacle width thickening ... Or are we going to shift to some other form of business?

So technical interview time but whenever I look at algorithm, data structure questions now I feel demotivated... it sort of feels like boring pointless work.

But if i remove the context of preparing for an interview and say I have as much time as i need, it feels like a logical puzzle, challenge, something interesting I could use to kill some time, learn something new...

It feels like there's a divide like how I can go on and on about my personal projects but if you ask about work projects, I give you the boilerplate or have to really think about what to say...

And so now I'm feeling fucked for the phone screens and algo interviews that I'm supposed to be having soon... and let's just say one of them may be with a really really big tech company...

Had a call at university. I was about to introduce new students into some general functionalities about the institution.
I was the only one activating his webcam and had some great monologues for an audience consisting of a bunch black screens. It was extremely weird to ask for questions and get literally no response at all - uff.

Today was a little better, we discussed a bit about design with client and agreed to add two new screens inside application. Need to organize some backend logic for this.

Nothing difficult but there might be some problems as we progress trough this data during first implementation.

Don’t have a graphic designer in a team anymore so lots of freedom and mistakes.

So I decided to buy a new graphic card to fully enjoy my PC games. Once I set it up it sounded like the fans were working too hard,so I decided to open the computer case and clean inside.

And now it doesn't boot anymore. Nothing at all on the screens.

I don't know what I did, only the fans are turning when I press the power button. Even the led on the front of the case is not blinking anymore.
I have enjoyed my new graphic card during one hour all in all. Frustration is high.

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

So how do you find motivation to finish a work project which is supposed to "go long"?

So, umm, this is weird, but i have been in this situation a few times and i am not sure if i deal with them correctly.

- the company proposes a brand new feature : a feature which never existed in the product before.
- they have high level directions (both business logics and technical) on how its supposed to be build
-they set vague but comfortable timelines (20-30days) to complete it
- they align me as the main dev for frontend, some x guy for backend , some y guy for parallel frontend (ios/web) and kinda forget about us.
- the business requirements are evolved/cleared as we go on making the product, the backend keeps on providing evolving apis which get stable over time.
- the business ppl shows that yeah there is no pressure and we won't mind extending this for release as other systems will be "obviously" taking time.
- our (the folks on new feature) feature is sidelined .nd we are rarely talked about until we reach those deadlines and at that time we are questioned.

I... am not a powerful performer in these situations. adding a new feature required solving some major problems again and again , while solving smaller problems too, so as the product finally takes shape . for eg:
1. i will start fast by adding all the possible screens, their abstract code, their navigation logic, their xmls etc
2. then based on designs, i will try creating designs a bit
3. then once the apis arrive, i start adding them and modify the logic to handle those.
4. meanwhile many smaller problems come up , like when sending an image from one screen to the previous screen, the thumbnail don't show up, so i spend 5+ hours ensuring that it works precisely . or how i could make 3 api calls in async and make the upload flow better.

5. this goes on for days, until and i and other people start to realise that my project is not upto the point of completion

i keep getting distracted from the original goal of making a working poc first and then fixing the nuances

Have you tried transporting you'r pc monitors inside suitcases? Ill be moving to another country and would like to get my screens with me. Its a six hours flight to the new destination.

Have you tried it? What precautions you took, how it went?

New laptop. HP z book. It stopped working so I had to have a new motherboard. After the new motherboard I kept getting BSOD. Got it upgraded to Win 10 (it was supposed to be runing this not 7). Still getting BSOD with the bonus of black screens wanting me to restore. Even better I've gotten No OS found on boot. My work won't let me have a Mac or exchange my laptop. But am I done yet? Fuck you.

I kind of need to replace my ThinkPad T430 soon. I bought it for about $200 3 years ago, and I love it and it just works and does it's job. But the fan noise is getting annoying, the battery is pretty much dead and yeah well, the screen does suck.

I've been thinking about replacing said parts, which would cost me about $150. Which is almost what I paid for the device back then, but I don't know I don't really want a new one. The T430 is a sexy old lady, just needs some polishing.

Now to my questions..

Would you say it's worth it?

Is there a big noticeable difference from a glossy 1366x768 LCD screen to a matte 1600x900 LCD screen?

Would you pick matte over glossy?

Do LCD screens always suck?

In case you would just buy a new notebook, can you give me any recommendations? The notebook market is huge and I have no idea what to look for.

I'm not a big Hardware guy as you can see, I have honestly no idea about screens and panels and such.