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Search - "oh look new project idea"
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Get ready for one of the biggest AMAZON rants EVER.
I dislike this company so much I can feel it in my bones.
They have NO, absolutely NO idea how user experience works.
PROBLEM #1.
If you have Amazon Prime / Video (ANOTHER FUCKED UP PROBLEM THAT CONFUSES A LOT OF PEOPLE) and you want to watch a movie on your Xbox using the Amazon App, You have to buy the movie ON YOUR COMPUTER FIRST, YOU CAN’T BUY IT DIRECTLY FROM THE APP.
WHAT THE SHIT AMAZON?
So.. go to your laptop, buy the movie, go back to your other device (Xbox or whatever), click “My movie library” and then you can watch it.
OH AND THERE’S ALSO A “MY WATCHLIST”, WHERE YOUR NEW PURCHASED / RENTED MOVIE DOES NOT SHOW UP.
Yes.. there is a “MY WATCHLIST” and “My movie library” or some shit.
HOW, WHY, WHY FUCKING AMAZON, WHY.
PROBLEM #2.
“WE HAVE A ZILLION ALEXA SKILLS NOW !!!1!!!!!11111! EINZ!!!!!”
Yeah, WELL, NOT THAT HARD WHEN YOU HAVE “Alexa Evangelist” traveling to every DAMN tech convention and having them make USELESS FUCKING SKILLS THAT NOBODY WANTS USING BOILER PLATE CRAP THAT ANYBODY CAN USE.
Oh and Alexa is DUMB AS SHIT.
I asked her "Play the song Starboy by the Weeknd" and she said: "I CAN'T FIND THAT SONG"
Then you go "Play me Starboy" and she goes: "HERE IS A SAMPLE OF STARBOY BY THE WEEKND"
Same with other songs: "YOU DONT HAVE IT IN YOUR PRIME MUSIC LIBRARY".
She doesn't even TRY to go to your fucking Spotify account, you have say: "Play Starboy by The Weeknd on Spotify" AND THEN she still has the FUCKING NERVES to say : "I Can't find that song on Spotify".
BUT YOU JUST FOUND IT ON YOUR OWN DAMN CRAPPY PRIME MUSIC.
"Hey Alexa, how many days till the end of the year?"
GUESS WHAT ,SHE CAN'T TELL YOU. (maybe now but not 2 months ago)
PROBLEM #3.
AUDIBLE.COM and AUDIBLE.CO.UK have DIFFERENT FUCKING DATABASES, THUS, YOU CAN END UP HAVING 2 ACCOUNTS AND HAVING 2 LIBRARIES, and.. THERE IS NO WAY TO FUSE THEM INTO 1 account.
OH MY GOD, HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?
I FUCKING HATE that, how can ANYBODY think that is a GOOD IDEA?
PROBLEM #4.
Their website is a TOTAL FUCKING mess, really, who the FUCK designs that piece of SHIT.
Look up a movie, let’s say “SCHOOL OF ROCK”
First result?
“School Of Rock” - “Amazon Video”
So you can click on this and watch the movie.
Then click the second result.
“School of Rock Blu RAY” and next to the price-tag “PRIME”
You click on it, you can buy it, but HEY, LOOK, WHAT DOES IT SAY?
“Unlimited Streaming with Amazon Prime
Start your 30-day free trial to stream thousands of movies & TV shows included with Prime. Start your free trial”
WHAT, WHAT!!!! CAN I WATCH THIS WITH AMAZON PRIME? OR DO I NEED THE AMAZON VIDEO? I DON’T GET IT.
Put me in a room with all those FUCKWIT project managers and their fucked up company culture and I’ll rip them a new one, I can go on for DAYS about the SHIT they are doing.15 -
preface: swearing.
because anger.
So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.
It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.
HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.
Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.
What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.
Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.
You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!
oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.
SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.
Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.
The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?
like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.
Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.
then again, fuck this significantly more.
UGH.18 -
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!2 -
LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR
* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *
30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*
*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *
"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."
My first reaction:
"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."
Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.
Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."
I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:
In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.
I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?
Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.
Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!
I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"1 -
*starts to work on a new project while others remain unfinished*
*bulb lights up* oh look a new project idea
*goes on to start on that one instead*
Being a student developer is awkward.3 -
Been working on a new project for the last couple of weeks. New client with a big name, probably lots of money for the company I work for, plus a nice bonus for myself.
But our technical referent....... Goddammit. PhD in computer science, and he probably. approved our project outline. 3 days in development, the basic features of the applications are there for him to see (yay. Agile.), and guess what? We need to change the user roles hierarchy we had agreed on. Oh, and that shouldn't be treated as extra development, it's obviously a bug! Also, these features he never talked about and never have been in the project? That's also a bug! That thing I couldn't start working on before yesterday because I was still waiting the specs from him? It should've been ready a week ago, it's a bug that it's not there! Also, he notes how he could've developes it within 40 minutes and offered to sens us the code to implement directly in our application, or he may even do so himself.... Ah, I forgot to say, he has no idea on what language we are developing the app. He said he didn't care many times so far.
But the best part? Yesterday he signales an outstanding bug: some data has been changed without anyone interacting. It was a bug! And it was costing them moneeeeey (on a dev server)! Ok, let's dig in, it may really be a bug this time, I did update the code and... Wait, what? Someone actually did update a new file? ...Oh my Anubis. HE did replace the file a few minutes before and tried to make it look like a bug! ..May as well double check. So, 15 minutes later I answer to his e-mail, saying that 4 files have been compromised by a user account with admin privileges (not mentioning I knee it was him)... And 3 minutes later he answered me. It was a message full of anger, saying (oh Lord) it was a bug! If a user can upload a new file, it's the application's fault for not blocking him (except, users ARE supposed to upload files, and admins have been requestes to be able to circumvent any kind of restriction)! Then he added how lucky I was, becausw "the issue resolved itself and the data was back, and we shouldn't waste any more yime.on thos". Let's check the logs again.... It'a true! HE UPLOADED THE ORIGINAL FILES BACK! He... He has no idea that logs do exist? A fucking PhD in computer science? He still believes no one knows it was him....... But... Why did he do that? It couldn't have been a mistake. Was he trying to troll me? Or... Or is he really that dense?
I was laughing my ass of there. But there's more! He actually phones my boss (who knew what had happened) to insult me! And to threaten not dwell on that issue anymore because "it's making them lose money". We were both speechless....
There's no way he's a PhD. Yet it's a legit piece of paper the one he has. Funny thing is, he actually manages to launch a couple of sort-of-nationally-popular webservices, and takes every opportunity to remember us how he built them from scratch and so he know what he's saying... But digging through google, you can easily find how he actually outsurced the development to Chinese companies while he "watched over their work" until he bought the code
Wait... Big ego, a decent amount of money... I'm starting to guess how he got his PhD. I also get why he's a "freelance consultant" and none of the place he worked for ever hired him again (couldn't even cover his own tracks)....
But I can't get his definition of "bug".
If it doesn't work as intended, it's a bug (ok)
If something he never communicated is not implemented, it's a bug (what.)
If development has been slowed because he failed to provide specs, it's a bug (uh?)
If he changes his own mind and wants to change a process, it's a bug it doesn't already work that way (ffs.)
If he doesn't understand or like something, it's a bug (i hopw he dies by sonic diarrhoea)
I'm just glad my boss isn't falling for him... If anything, we have enough info to accuse him of sabotage and delaying my work....
Ah, right. He also didn't get how to publish our application we needes access to the server he wantes us to deploy it on. Also, he doesn't understand why we have acces to the app's database and admin users created on the webapp don't. These are bugs (seriously his own words). Outstanding ones.
Just..... Ffs.
Also, sorry for the typos.5 -
TL;DR: FFS Microsoft
So yesterday we were at the point in our project where adding a login system seemed like a good idea. This is an asp.net core mvc project and we use Materialize for our frontend.
So according to _the tutorials_ we could start a new project and add authentication in the prompt by pressing a button. As it created the project I thought it seemed nice and easy enough. After it had created the test solution I build it and, sure enough, in the top right corner there were a register and login <a>.
I checked them out and they were your bog standard form input input submit and all. Now I guessed I could look at how it's all programmed aaaaaaaaand
Nope.
I saw a new folder located at Areas/Identity/Pages which had a _ViewStart.cshtml which contained three lines. There were also a database migration and in Startup.cs there were some database stuff, but other than that? Nothing. So where on earth was the login and register form located? Shit like that is frustrating ya know.
But oh well it seemed to work and I switched to our examn project where I found it was possible to scaffold the login system in a way that seemed nice.
Except, for some reason bootstrap and jquery decided to return to our project. FFS Microsoft!1