I just had a client complaining on the phone that she read my database design documents and that they are all wrong and need to be done again. Because things like varchar and int are confusing. And nobody understands what they mean. She asked around and nobody understood it.

Ooh, and I should place the customer name in more then one table because it would be handy to have in several places.

Spend a hour on the phone trying to explain that these documents are not intended for her. They are not for her to understand.

I make these documents to build a stable product and in case something bad happens to me its easier to pick up for another developer.

Long story short.. I'm currently making a document that explains the database design... Getting paid for it..... But fucking hell. Somebody save me.

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

"Let's go for the low hanging fruit first" 🤢

"I think we should do some market research" 🤢

"Yeah that is also on my radar" 🤢

OKAY YOU FUCKING CUNT, STOP WITH YOUR PATRONIZING SHIT.

FIRST OF ALL, ARE YOU REALLY SO SMALL MINDED THAT YOU CAN'T REACH ANY HIGHER? THIS TREE IS FUCKING RAW AMD BARE ON THE BOTTOM, WITH YOUR FILTHY CLAWS GRASPING FOR ALL THOSE EASY NARROW FIXES.

SECONDLY, A FUCKING EMAIL SURVEY WITH BIASED QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY 3 HOBOS IS NOT BLOODY MARKET RESEARCH.

THIRDLY, IF THIS NUCLEAR ICBM OF AN INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM IS ON YOUR RADAR, MAYBE STOP FONDLING YOUR SWEATY BALLS FOR A MINUTE AND TAKE ACTION.

"Okay lets peel this onion, so we hit the ground running" 😩🤢😞

NO, LET'S NOT "HIT THE GROUND RUNNING", YOU'RE GOING TO FUCKING TRIP AND MESS UP YOUR FACE EVEN MORE. HOW ABOUT GET YOUR PILE OF SHIT IN ORDER FOR ONCE, PREPARE FOR A MEETING? HOW ABOUT THOUGHTFUL ACTION, SOME FEATURE DESIGN?

"No, just implement it quick and dirty" 🤢😡👿

OH YOU WANT IT QUICK AND DIRTY? IS THAT HOW YOU FUCK YOUR DAD AS WELL?

"Let's evaluate the fix in a few weeks. We really had good synergy here team" 🤢😫

YEAH SURE, LET'S EVALUATE THIS.... BUT LET'S EVALUATE IT RIGHT NOW: 😡

"Ahem....

1. You're always late for meetings.
2. After 6 months, you still barely know what we do as a company, you still don't know the teams, and you still don't know the product.
3. You do not listen to engineers flooding you with red flags, requiring time for a redesign to fix serious scaling issues.
4. Everything must be a quickfix, nothing is allowed to require thought, because you CAN ABSOLUTELY NOT think ahead for more than 30 seconds.

OH AND IF YOU EVER AGAIN COVER UP ONE OF YOUR MANY SHORTCOMINGS WITH THAT FUCKING SLIMEY DOUCHEBAG MANAGER VOCABULARY OF YOURS, LET'S SEE HOW MUCH SYNERGY YOU FEEL WHEN YOU'RE DEEPTHROATHING A CACTUS."

Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him

Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent

Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.

*2 weeks later and still no designs*

Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.

*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*

Boss: hurry up!

*1 week later*

Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol

Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it

*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.

* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*

*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol

*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*

*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*

New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(

Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...

*Silence*

Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested

*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*

Seems legit?

"I am not happy with the quality of the product"

*Ignores

"I dislike how I am forced to work here"

*Ignores

"The team does not understand software design and is writing 2000 line single functions"

*Ignores

"I am starting to think the product cannot be saved unless we start focusing on quality"

*Ignores

"I am not happy in my job anymore because I want to work as a professional..."

*Ignores

"All I ever do now is put out fires"

*Ignores

"I quit"

Requirements vs Delivery - Guide to Programming
This one is a killer and I've received it in multiple forwards in office email, and we always have a good laugh seeing this joke.

Client: “Our next requirement, and this is something big you know, we need an elephant”
IT Team: But why don’t you adjust with a buffalo, even it is big…. and black?”

Client: No, we need an elephant only, let me explain our current process……” (client explains for an hour)
IT Team: Fine, I understand your requirement. But our system supports only a buffalo…

Client:We need only an elephant!
IT Team: Ok, let me see if I can customize it for you”

Requirements are taken as follows:
Client wants a big black four legged animal, long tail, less hair. Having trunk is mandatory. The same was documented, signed off and sent to offshore for development!

At the Offshore Development Centre,

Design/Development – Based on requirement all features are supported in base product (as buffalo), for trunk alone a separate customization is done.

Finally the customization is shown to client:

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

My main working laptop has delete button at the top right corner of keyboard just like the normal rest of keyboards on this planet. But some people think it is boring to be doing thing in consistent manner. And so they made this.

Result is 4 times involuntarily went into sleep mode. Gazillion times I swear I can tear the dick out of that genius who came up with this idea and swirl his brain around using said dick. If it was a girl, I'm gonna shove a durain up her vajayjay.

Oh BTW, both laptops brand is ASUS.

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

So the remote manager who won't reply to my emails or slacks, won't invite me to meetings with product / design, won't ask for my opinion on deadline dates and won't tell me whats being said in meetings (despite repeated effort on my part to change this);

Has decided to send an angry email, cc'ing a bunch of people, about "constant deadline slippage" and poor planning on our part focusing on features that should have been de-prioritised.

ahem
*clears throat for maximum yelling rant-ability*

<rant>
I HAVE BEEN EMAILING YOU FOR FUCKING WEEKS ASKING TO TALK ABOUT THE DEADLINES YOU FUCKING COLOSSAL ASS CLOWN.

I'VE BEEN REPEATEDLY TOLD THAT THESE FEATURES ARE A MUST HAVE AFTER ASKING TO DE-PRIORITISE THEM, AND HAVE TOLD YOU THE DATES ARE NOT FEASIBLE.

ONE MORE, ONE MORE EMAIL OR BAD COMMENT AND I'M EXPENSING A TRIP OVER THERE, TO KICK YOU SQUARE IN THE NUTS AS HARD AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. I'LL HAPPILY BREAK MY FOOT OFF IF NECESSARY, YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT.
</rant>

... the above is work appropriate to email back to him and all the higher ups right?

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

My favorite kind of interview question/challenge is anything that is highly practical for the job. At the current company I work, the coding test/interview challenge was to design and implement an API very similar to the core functionality of the actual product. It’s fair, tests for skills relevant to the job, and is much better than irrelevant silly brain teasers and cs questions, I feel.

In terms of specific questions, one of my favorites is one that one of my colleagues suggested I ask to potential candidates: describe what you think your biggest failed project/task was in your engineering career, and what happened/what you learned. I think it’s a good reflective question that can tell a lot about someone.

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.

While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.

So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)

After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.

The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.

My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).

So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.

... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.

1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)

2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)

3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)

4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)

I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.

just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?

I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.

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!

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

i am BEYOND pissed at google.

as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.

when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.

ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.

but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).

so now this screen pops up.

"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.

well, i'll create one. simple enough.

no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.

i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.

i truly hope someone got fired.

so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.

now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'

i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.

google is a fucker.

after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.

i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?

after i press enter, it started.

what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?

i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???

maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.

fuck you google.

I fucking want to skin alive my engineering senior director and VP.

Fucking piece of shit people. Looking at their faces from behind the screen, I can sense them stink doneky balls.

They have made my life hell.

The entire tech architecture is absolute shit in nature and engineers cannot even build a single blue colour button without creating a major fuss about it.

Every single aspect of product is built kept in my only the engineer persona. Everyone else can go and suck a racoon's dick.

And they have no concept of tech debt. They just keep building and building stuff. And then build some more.

Entire engineering org is in rush to ship shit at the end of sprint and if they don't then VP and Director are pissed. So to keep those two half witted donkeys happy, these people ship garbage. And all they comment is "cool, very cool".

And hence, entire fucking product is built because it's cool irrespective of whether it solves a problem or not.

A single user role authorisation or authentication is so fucking complex that it would take an eternity for even a developer to figure what's happening.

Fucking toxic human wastes.

There's a company wide mandate to use a certain tech stack, design guidelines, and a vision that all teams have to align. But these faggots are going in opposite direction to do what they feel like and forcing everyone else to ignore all other engagements or alignments with other teams.

These two people should be skinned alive in town square during noon and then left there until they dehydrate entirely. Fucking baboons.

I am so fucking pissed with such mindset.

"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

I started a new job today (remote) and my first task was to improve product sign-up process, basically the UX is shit and the backend is even worse, never felt so bad looking at terrible software design my entire life and career. My first assignment was to introduce some sanity. (Mr. Supervisor's exact words)

Anyway, I report directly to upper management but need to get onboarded by current technology expert who's highly skilled at writing shitty code and is also stupid, literally.

It took the whole day to get him to grant access to the private repo in order to start working but that's not the story.

So, I'm seated, demoralised about the structure of software I have to work on and here I was refreshing localhost:7878 consistently and was consistently getting the message:
"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

So, this same codebase I have is suppose to be the exact same one that's powering the app in production. I was furious and confused. Is stupid calling me a bitch already??? He wants to fuck??? What the hell!!!

I called him and turns out, I was suppose to switch branches. The branch I had was suppose to show that message intentionally (??!???!???) (His words exactly), I couldn't even muster the words "Why" completely before he hung up.

So basically, I got onboarded today. Quite successfully, I must add, because I know exactly the battlesuit I have to wear to my new remote job going forward!

Product owner:

Okay we have users and groups. Users have roles, roles have permissions, but groups can also have roles or permissions. Clients have users and these client-users can have special kinds of permissions. Now we need to add projects which have pages and special project users who manage the projects, but only the client-users can set rights for which project owners can manage pages. Pages are coupled to roles, and assigned to workflows, unless the client-user already had the permission to... wait where are you going?"

Me: "Fetching a new SSD. I ran out of hard disk space trying to model the database design. Could you please start from the top when I get back?"

So, I love scribbling ideas on a whiteboard, like I'm sure most developers here do!

It's a release of creativity and a starting point for many sources of software I've developed in the past. And something that doesn't happen all too often where I get an overflow of ideas and put them on a board.

This week was one such rare week where the ideas just came streaming in and the floodgates weren't able to hold them back...

Then came the dam wall down river... MANAGEMENT!

They had already sold a product to the customer that didn't exist yet and tasked a junior developer (I'm talking fresh out of school) to deliver. Of course, this was promised last year already and now the customer had paid and is waiting for the goods!

Along I come with this design which will enable the product to grow, allow the junior development to learn, me to mentor and for us all to let the creative juices flow, all while I get to flex my web dev muscles.

But management wants something now! A temporary solution for the customer to keep them happy, seeing as they've paid some money, which is to be developed by the junior dev on his lonesome.

Meanwhile my beautiful design has been snuffed out and are mere streaks and smears on a whiteboard, and the creative juices seem to have dried up since.

I am feeling somewhat despondent at the moment...

WHY THE FUCKING FUCK CAN FUCKING DESIGNERS NOT FUCKING DESIGN TO FUCKING STANDARDS.

Do they have to just piss all over photoshop and expect us developers to turn their insanity into something that doe snot make us fucking cringe.

To top it off its some old ass legecy product bloated up with that useless peice of shit bootstrap, guess they forgot to mention that to the designer too, not that it would of made any difference with this pile of shit he churned out.

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

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

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

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

Why did I ever decided to do frontend development?

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

rant.

when you're a programmer surrounded by designer friends, it feels frustrating sometimes.

people appreciate what they do more because they can clearly see the end product: beautifully designed ui, animated splash screens, clean colorful themes. even though it probably does squat other than to print statements.

then they look at your overly simple design and cant see the beautiful underlying code within.

end rant.

So here is my week 72 as a reviewer. But first, let me ask y'all. Am I weird to think that you should finish coding the thing and testing the thing before kicking it out to review? Cuz that's how I do it. And that is the process at my work place.

So anyway, I was doing this review. And it was very wrong. Like really, really wrong. We give a thorough intro to our product (perhaps too thorough) so this guy should have known every test case he had to cover. Or at least, if he was unsure, asked. It was all documented.

Anyway, he kicks out this peer review. First thing I notice, it is not following the standard. Fair enough, we didn't give him the coding standard. BUT HE DIDN'T EVEN MAINTAIN THE FORMAT OF THE ORIGINAL FILE. HE JUST DID HIS OWN THING!!! So I email him the coding standard and make a comment in the review. He denies the finding. No reason. Just turns it down. Strike 1.

Then, I'm going through and he didn't even cover all of the core cases. I found several core cases that he missed. And every edge case. Make a not of it. He fixes only the couple of examples I gave him. Strike 2.

Guy decided to redesign a major chunk of our interfaces. Our interfaces are not just used by us (hence interfaces). We designed them the way they were for a reason. It was not a fun design process. Myself, the architect, one of our customers, and the guy that did the implementation all told him to roll back his change. Especially since it wasn't in the scope of what he was doing. He wouldn't. Strike 3.

I go to the lead and bring him in. He has a talk with him. All of the sudden he is putting out multiple builds per finding. Like most times I will put out like 2 to 4 for the whole peer review. No he kicks out minimum one per finding and chokes the review queue. Strike 4.

Strike 5: he tells me, a former DBA, that I didn't know what I was talking about when I told him to move something into a new table, even after I told him that "while in database terms it doesn't make sense, this is for product robustness".

Strike 6: he was just a condescending asshole. Bragging about how he did this job and that job over his career. His longest position held was about 18 months. Bragged about working at my company and being some hotshot at the company: only worked here for 8 months and that was 5 years ago.

You know. I have never really wanted to fight someone after about undergrad. But he came close.

I'm a lead engineer, I design, I code, I debug, I test, I struggle, I deliver, I'm just a basic building block in my company, hardly involve in product roadmap planning. This is pretty clear in my LinkedIn profile. Jp Morgan recruiter called me for Vice president role. VP? Seriously? me skipping 4-5 levels, just with an interview process? Are you kidding me?
I asked her two times "...are you sure?", I lost my words, somehow gathered courage and asked, "what's the portfolio looks like, how many people will report to me?" Then she, calmly revealed that it's just an ic dev role and they name it that ways in their company.

What the actual ducking-duck-duckkk!

P.s. not sure about jpmc rest of the world but that's how it is in jp Morgan india.

A month or so ago this manufacturer of soldering equipment contacted me with the request to make a video about a review unit (a soldering handle) that they'd send to me for free in exchange. Initially I was really pumped about it - company would send me free stuff!! - but fast-forward to today and I realized how terrible a choice I've made by accepting that offer.

See, that handle is worth only €40 and I've spent so much time on the bloody video material already that it'd make my "pay" expected to be close to €1/h if not less. I feel like I've been exploited, especially since I don't even like the handle's design and am not using it. It's just collecting dust, making my work essentially free labor.

I could return the item but that's gonna cost me a fuckload of money, I could pay for the handle and cut my losses that way.. or I could do the review anyway and end up feeling very bad about that company. Or I could tell them to fuck off and lose a supply chain for my soldering equipment.

I have no idea what to do about this..

Oh and the fact that the correspondent in that company has the worst Chinglish skills imaginable, the communication skills of a toddler and is also super indecisive (they asked me to make a YouTube video first which led me to assume a video format for YouTube, but instead they want to put it on their fucking AliExpress product page, rendering my existing video footage useless!) doesn't help either.. I hate that shit company. Fucking leeches!

Anyway, what would you do when you're in a position like that?

Boss came in with new project:
boss shows me the design
me: it's a wordpress website ?
boss: client wants it with prestashop
me: but the brief is for an ecommerce website with 2 categories and a blog, wordpress with woocommerce and a blog should be enought
boss: no, client wants it with prestashop

oh I forgot, client wants it in a shared hosting server, where I can't add php extensions

started the project, fucked my weekend with anxiety and depression, and then products list came in ... 15 product

me: ok, I need to get the fuck out quick

I quit, I sleep at night, I smile with my kids ...

Amazing how people misuse the term technical debt.

A bug is a flaw in your design/development.

Tech debt is a conscious decision/tradeoff, which is often tracked and removed as the product matures.

The difference is subtle. Avoid this mix up at least in written communication.

Fuckbug client has no brain but worse is fuckbug has not one bit of understanding.

I am a fucking developer not a fucking DESIGNER.

You are supposed to give me your fucking information. Information as in text and photos and documents that I can use with minimal modification for your FUCKING website.

It was fucking stupid of me to help you out with non-dev work in the first place. My fucking stupidest mistake of 2017.

Just for the fucking slider, this whole goddamn project is dragging for the whole 2017.

I even helped you out with taking the fucking product photo at your office with my camera so we can have decent images to use.

I stupidly helped you out with doing photoshop of those images with your product labels and stuffs.

But in the end, you fucking dare give me 1 properly designed image to use in slider. Then ask me to change the rest of sliders with similar design like that one. If you have that image why the fuck cannot you do the fucking rest by yourself and come and fucking ask me.

I fucking hate you.

So, my boss was angry at me today because...
1. "Why are we taking so long to finish the software?". We started coding in March, and during that time I kept asking for requirements, design and his answer was, "You build it and we'll see." . During that time, after creating the system with only three type of user modes, he was like "Oh, I want customized user permissions." Took me 1 month to come up with a design, implementation for everything. Also during these months, nearly 2 months was wasted because he kept giving me other things to do, and I was not focusing in my current project.

Today he was mad because he expect me not only to build the infrastructure, setup servers, write backend code, do QA etc, He wants me to be a product designer. A fucking product designer. My answer to him was "If you refuse to help with designing the UX, either hire someone or I will just copy/paste things for internet. If the UI works, there's where my job is done."

Fucking hell. Not only I am being under payed, but he expects do to the job of 5 other people. Fuck this shit.

What do you need a boss if you can find the idea, analyze it, design the product, code it, test it, setup the cloud and even do the marketing.

Dear bosses,

I am a developer not a God!

FUCK YOU BUSINESS GUY
FUCK YOUR SCOPE CREEP
SOLO DEV AINT GIVING U 20 FEATURES IN ONE MOTHERFUCKING WEEK

Seriously, though. Being a solo full-stackq developer who can do both frontend (react, redux) and backend (feathers, node) does NOT mean you have twice the manpower to accomplish all of your shitty shit. Just because you have an idea does NOT mean I have to implement all of it. You don't even have a motherfucking specifications for me, yet you expect me to deliver shitloads of complete fucking feature in a fucking week. This is not a fucking joke. I am NOT your mother fucking tool. I need time to build my stack, design and perfect the interface. I don't want a shitty motherfucking product on my fucking portfolio.

*dies inside*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because backend developers are respected.

You’re not.

The company I am currently working for is partnering with another startup. Nothing special about that. We should integrate their API into our system. I wasn't involved in the process when it came to checking there API and if it would work with our Systems. The Person who did that already left the company so I was left behind with some internal documentation. In that Documentation is already written that API is basically trash....

After I started integrating the API I found more and more flaws in the design. They are not sending any responses that would help, when a param is missing or the authentication isn't correct, only 500's . I got some documentation from the partner company so i thought it will be fine as long as the Documentation would be accurate. Turns out the documentation isn't even close to be up to date. Wrong content types wrong endpoints, wrong naming. Basically we could not work with that. We shortly contacted the partner Company. After a few WEEKS we got a response that they updated the Documentation what was right but still not everything was correct. At this point I lost my mind. I researched a little bit about them, the company is founded from 2 young people who basically came strait out of the University and doest have any experience or idea how to build an API. I investigated a little bit there websites.

They have an Admin panel on the base domain from their API but it is only accessible via HTTP. Like WTF , They use HTTP for an Admin Panel this must be a joke right?

They use Cloudflare without a HTTP to HTTPS redirection ???

I really had not that much time to research in there website but if I find these things in 5 minutes I don't want to know what I can find in like an hour.

At the end we will still use them as partners because surprise surprise our company already sold the product that uses their API.

I know that I will be the person who has to help fixing this shit when it breaks and it will break 1000% JUST FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE PARTNER COMPANY. FUCK THERE API.

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

10 year anniversary 'celebration' for a couple of employees (one dev, one a DBA) and the VP of the department was saying kind words about them, talking about the 'good old days'.

VP to the DBA: "I apologize, when you started, you walked into my database architecture. I didn't know that much back then and never thought about the architecture much beyond a few years. Its amazing my design has lasted over 20 years and triple digit business growth..blah blah blah"

Inner voice: "Mother F-er!...My database was designed IN SPITE of your meddling and demanding to create 1,500 field tables. Shut the F up you egotistical bastard!"

I can't even count how many times I had to stop him from, for example, adding a 'ProductID' field to a Customer table.

Me: "Why did you add a product id field?"
VP: "How else will we know what product the customer wants to buy?"
Me: "You mean like a wish list? What if the customer wants more than one product?"
VP: "Oh, that’s easy, we'll create more fields when that happens. ProductID2. Microsoft made it really easy to add fields."
Me: "We already have a wish list table schema. Customer can have as many wish lists and as many products as they want."
VP: "I don't understand. All I want is a field for me to store the product I'm buying. I don't know why you make this so hard, its just one more field."

Now the VP is bragging all the success was due to his expertise?! Gaaaaahhhh!

I quelled my rage with ample quantities of donuts, juice, and chocolate milk.

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

I can't believe this company has not hired a ux designer yet!

Team managers have no clear design principles to follow, they are coming up with design changes and ideas on the fly.

For fucks sake, at least provide a reference design or color sets to implement instead of complaining to me when i use hard colors like red / green / blue on first version of what you asked to do.

I hate doing minor style changes on code when you have no clear vision about the design.

I think the end product is gonna end up as a ux nightmare without a ux specialist.

Today I delivered the beta of my first product to the customer. The customer is only a different department within my company, but I'm still proud of what I've built. This project was of my own design and vision and it actually landed me the position I'm in today. Now I sit back and wait for feedback as they tear it apart and find out what works for them.

Finally got my Bluetooth earphones!
It's called Pamu Scroll, funded in Indiegogo.
I bought it for $49 without shipping fee.
Now let me write a review about it here after using for about an hour or so.

1. Shipment
Shipment from China is slow and hard to track unless it is classified as EMS, which mine wasn't, obviously.

2. Packaging
It has some shock protection layer, but without that, nope! It was staying still inside the packaging though.

3. Design
Beautiful. Just beautiful. Period. Just see the picture below.
It opens as a papyrus, maybe that's why it is called Pamu Scroll. Both the case's end, and earphones itself has magnets to hold each other.
It has a leather feeling to both the inside and outside of the case, and the touch control area of the earphones is also leather feeling, adding a nice touch that differs with other earphonnes.
The diamond feeling finish in the end of the case makes the case itself isn't earphones, more like some expensive jewelry case.

4. Fit
My ears are smaller than most people, for I am young, so it sometimes fall off when I jump, but when I put it the correct way, never falls out.

5. Audio
I am not an audiophile. I don't really care about the audio quality and how it sounds like unless the sound is too cringy and has so many white noise.
This earphones has white noise, but just a little bit, you won't notice except when you are in a quiet room.
The bass is boosted, but low sounds, and vocals can be cringy sometimes, so I should manually tune them with my phone's equalizer.

6. IPX6
Not tested yet, but they advertise as using it in the shower.

7. Stereo call
Yup. Stereo call. Call in both ears. But only right microphone seems to get the voice.

8. Pairing
Using BT 5, it is a breeze to connect.
Take both of them out, put to your ear, then ding! "Connected"
Done.

9. Charging
with micro-usb
wireless charging for optional purchase - 10 bucks

10. battery
Reasonable amount
You have 3.5 hrs of listening time in both ears, and you can charge 2 times more each by putting in the case.

===============

Overall, it is awesome and let's just pray it doesn't break for at least for an year.

One side note, I can activate assistant by double tapping in the left ear (yes it is touch control), but my S8 asks me if I want to customize with Automate/Tasker. Yup!
Will share that later as well.

If you have any questions, ask me! Thanks for reading my first ever product review in devRant! <3

So I was in an interview for a web developer position in a startup and the interviewer said to me "Do you think you'll be able to help the guys with CAD design?" I have no idea what to say. Does this guy even know what a developer is??!?!? I mean not that I dont know how to use CAD, but I'm applying as a DEVELOPER, not a product designer

I'm getting more and more triggered by my colleagues overusing words in seemingly random fashion.

The word 'perspective' comes up at least 6 times during a meeting, from an x perspective, from a y perspective. It would be fine in a design meeting but it's used _so fucking much_ I cringe every time I hear it.

Another one is 'standard', that gets put in front of every word nowadays, standard process, standard protocol, standard machine, standard pipeline. What does it mean? No clue, what does it add? Nothing.

'Please put this add the standard location.'

Where?

'The default one'

What?!

I remove it from documentation every chance I get.

Furthermore, some documentation changes make small pieces of information super long. A nice summary list of features? Make it at least 3 sentences for every bullet point. 1-sentence info with a reference link to more info? Scratch that let's include all information in that reference paragraph anyway. Sometimes they even expand English expressions for no reason, making them longer and harder to read.

WHYYYY

We always complain about shit documentation and yet we're oblivious to the fact that our own docs are so bloated. Stop repeating information, stop using useless adjectives, just put it all in 1 sentence and add dozens of code examples. One piece of code says more than a billion words.

I'm not innocent either. As a teen I was great at writing long pieces of text that seemed like a great read but were actually way too bloated for the information I needed to convey. It was great for reaching word limits.

Now I'm trying my absolute best to be as concise and to-the-point as possible because I know that nobody likes reading and people just want the information that they're looking for.

Even this rant is overly long, but thank god that it's just a rant and I can let off some steam.

Btw same thing goes for diagrams, too many icons, too much text, too many lines. When I try to submit a clean-as-fuck diagram I get asked to add more info/features to which I say No, we're already at the max.

I even got a PR for review that made some changes to add unnecessary information, I pointed it out and never heard anything from them again. I rejected the PR, and never saw a new one.

* Sigh *

It's just so strange to me, it's never clear to me why these things happen. I'm too much of a coward to point these things out unless they endanger the quality of the product. But maybe they just need somebody to tell it to them.

I’ve been interviewing with a startup for a Frontend Engineer role. In the interview they said they didn’t have a designer, that their founder and other devs do the design work. I thought “ok so they are still putting something together and don’t care much if the UI is crappy”, and still proceeded with it. I do the take-home test, it took a lot more than the 1-2 hours they said it should take (these estimates never seem realistic), I thought I did a pretty good job and send it back to them. I then got an email back from one of the founders, they really liked the code and my approach, but the UX was not good enough. He asked if I would be willing to iterate on it if given some direction? The direction: design your own version of our product. I refused. I thought this was a developer position, not a designer position.

F*CK...that feeling when you were working as a junior UI/UX designer for about 3 weeks in new company, you were on a project which is almost finished and delivered...

1 and half week Later (after technical issues - check my older rants)......

you have noticed one quite importat mistake in the designs, which were done by senior designers, which can lead in future to a huge Ux problems - so huge, that users will probably leave/close the app and will not purchase the product via that app... ( We can say than whole design solution was a waste of money for the client)... On that designes was working a team of 4 people, about 3 Months (and the app (prototype) had to be ready already 2 Months back)...

the deadline was pushed 2x already...

And your boss (senior designer) tell you that this is not such an issue.. But thx for your opinion.....

1 week Later by user testing 4 out of 4 people were asking about that stuff I told to my boss that is missing...

And I was ignored...

In less than 1 week Later after the testing I get fired from the company without no reason...

Or better - the reason was:

I have too little experiences for this job...
Dont know if I should laugh or cry🤦‍♀️🤣/😭

So last week I ranted about the hours I was working, great start this week I'm up at 03:00 to go up north, not going to get back till 20:00 ish. Tomorrow I have to be in Wales for 09:00 so going to have to be up at 04:00 for a 5 hour travel time. Check my emails and my boss says after I get back from Wales tomorrow can we have a design and specification meeting about a "super urgent" product that we have to develop. Oh and Thursday I have to prep everything for going live with a new product Friday.

The stupidest technical question I have ever been asked is actually more of a design question, but I think it'll appeal to DevRant people.

I had thrown together a logo for a new system that my team was making. The logo was basically a flat, solid circle of our corporate shade of blue, with the name of the product overlaid in Helvetica Light. It looked okay. Ish. Good enough, anyway.

Our junior-most senior manager came to have a look. She was the sort of person who always had to give feedback, on EVERYTHING. Everyone had given this little logo the nod, but she had to stare at it for ages, and then eventually asked:

"I like the text, but can you rotate the circle a few degrees?"

.
.
.

After an awkward pause I'm pleased to report that she realised her own mistake and we laughed it off, so I was not forced to stand up, point at her, and yell "DURRRRRRRRRR".

When I realized my job isn't to code, it is to hack for hacks.

As smart developers our job is to be accountable to non-technical product management types who care nothing for elegant system design or DRY code. They expect features get done fast and "technically complete." They use terms like "minimum viable product (MVP)" to imply we'll go back and improve things like refactoring and tech debt later.

They will not. Most likely they won't even be around. Producers and scrumlords have the highest turnover rate of any role on a team. By design they get bored or frustrated easily and are constantly looking for greener pastures. Many people in self-proclaimed "non-technical" roles like this never had the patience and attention span to learn a real vocation, and they've discovered a career path that doesn't require one.

These are our masters. As developers, we will answer to them forever and always.

Working on photo contest site, no design, no specification. 2 weeks until deadline.

CEO: Deadline is one week earlier, and client wants to have video uploads and automatic facebook share too.
Me: We don't even have a contract and design to work with yet.
CEO: No worries, the contract will be signed by the time you finished the website.

Site done in 1 week, including weekend days and overtime. Production on client's server as asked by CEO.

3 weeks later...

Me: So van you pay the overtime I worked?
CEO: Sorry client not payed and says they don't like the end product. I can't afford to pay you overtime.

2 days later.
CEO: The online department is lossy so you have to work harder in the next month, we have 3 sites to be done.

Me: Do we have the contracts?
CEO: No worries...

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

COO Snake ousts CEO, fires founders, is generally clueless about tech and product and design and science (and basically everything this business is about) and expected me to drop everything else I do (rich, varied and fulfilling) and work full time as a slave-nerd. Some people just don’t get it.

OsCommerce is literally the most awful piece of software ever. Granted, I'm migrating a version from 2007, but even still.

The admin area has a screen to set related products to a target product.

The page takes an age to load, even longer to save and is god awful to use from a UI POV.

Why may you ask?

The OsCommerce devs decided to display a flat list, which check boxes of ALL products in the database.

So for the site in question, that's a single list of 167,000 products, without pagination. Some of the worst development/design on a single page I've seen since last week when I inherited a god awful butchered Wordpress site :|

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.

Workload rant.

Our new line manager is overly expecting from all of us (product/design/tech) and is micro managing on ground level without having any real sense of reality. He just wants everything to be built overnight.

He is smart, no doubt about that. But guess, I learnt from him what I had to. Not to stereotype but he is a typical Indian manager who keeps pushing boundaries.

He just added 80 features for Q1 roadmap with on 3 PMs, 1 Designer, 1TPM, and bunch of techies .

What the actual fuck! 😂😂😂 And he wanted to add more, thankfully we ran out of time in the meeting.

And my super talent and genius blabbering co-woker who works mechanically just fucked herself real bad. Lol

I kept telling her not to add Feature XYZ to the roadmap because:
1. There'll be spill over from Q4
2. She is already overloaded with 1 task and keeps crying all day about being unable to handle it
3. She is setting wrong expectations with management for herself and rest of the team
4. Boss will add more work and she'll be fucked

She was adamant and did not listen.

Now this is what happened:
1. ALL her Q4 items got pushed to Q1. LMFAO
2. She was literally crying since morning on calls for being overloaded and we are yet to start Q1 assignments
3. Additional tasks along side feature XYZ were added on her plate

I tried to push back the manager and that's when he said okay, let's keep some items for Q2.

But holy shit. 80 features between such a small team and wanted to done in few weeks.

I need to pump more steam in my job hunt activity. This place is ridiculously toxic.

Product and Design have a common enemy. Yes, you guessed it right, Engineering.

The former aim to solve user problems and focus heavily on aesthetics most of the time. While the latter actually does it.

As a Product guy, I admit that I absolutely hate the role these days because all that are asked to focus on is engagement retention conversion and other fancy metrics. Community has missed the entire point of why the fucking role exist.

On the other hand, engineering always asks the best questions. Focuses on performance and scale while periodically checking on tech debt. Yes, they suck at business or sales but when the solution works, things automatically make money.

I DON'T FUCKING CARE HOW BEAUTIFUL YOUR APP IS, IF IT DOESN'T SOLVE MY PROBLEM THEN IT'S RUBBISH.

Functionality and UX matters to more than colour scheme or fonts. Reason why Amazon is a huge. They are functionally solving a great problem while constantly improvising UX and not giving a rat's ass on UI.

Another down side to your fancy design is that the UI elements make things heavier. No wonder engineers have always been the best problem solver.

We lost our way. Tech world needs to go back a decade or two to fix the tech debt.

We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.

Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.

The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.

We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.

Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster.

Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?

** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **

PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?

So the company decided to go agile. I am now a scrum master. And we have the local product owners and all. They made us do daily stand-ups.

I don't know what is a scrum master. Nobody knows what the hell is a stand-up. It seems to be an akward 30 minutes every day, when local product owner asks questions and demands status reports.

I did some googling and it seems that the scrum master is supposed to just support the team and solve problems. In our version the scrum master finds out the system architecture and requirements, fills the backlog, does the system design and reports to the project manager(s). Also reports to the clients about the general project status in an executive meetings. I also do the sprint planning, in which we fit the vague features that we are told into time tables with ready told dates.

Oh yeah, the team is just 2 guys. One of them is me. And the other guy relies completely on me to daily tell what to do, review the work and also answer all the project and company level questions that pop into his mind. He gets angry if he doesn't receive ready-thought solutions to all problems, since "you're the boss and it's your job to tell us what to do".

This is going to be a great year.

What do you do when your client WANTS a shitty website?
If it's considered a UI anti-pattern, he wants it.

I'm pretty frustrated because I keep bringing him what I consider professional-quality work and he's disappointed, asks for something dumb instead. I made the mistake of giving him Photoshop and encouraging him to try to design some of his ideas. I thought he would be frustrated and decide, okay, Patrick knows best. But that backfired. Now I'm forced to answer basic questions about "how to delete the pixels" and end up on TeamViewer for hours trying to explain vector masks.

His current bright idea is to advertise his product with a comic strip. And let me tell you, it looks really, really awful. Not tasteful material-design-esq vectors, he thinks those are dumb, he prefers crude clipart. But he loves it.

I've kind of dug myself a hole here. It's what the client wants. But the client wants a steaming pile of shit. What do I do? Also forgot to mention, dude is my landlord and I'm behind on rent. FML

pic related; it's his comic

HP makes shit devices. How the fuck you gonna regress with product design from 7 years ago?

Like whos the fucktard that thinks “how about in order to swap a keyboard, we make the user take EVERYTHING out and then put it into a new upper housing?”

Or my favorite is “instead of screwing a screen panel in, lets use some painfully difficult to access stretch tape?”

Fuck HP’s product design team. If by some off chance any of yall know anyone who’s part of that team, tell them i said they can eat a fat dick and get aids.

So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..

My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.

So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..

The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).

This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.

At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.

I started getting more into the product management side of the business lately, which involved being invited to what feels like 80 meetings per week.

My schedule today consisted of 5:30 of meetings, three of which were a single API design kickoff…

I’m starting to get why people are so damn mad at meetings all the time. Should’ve been a fucking email chain

I'd like to talk about my first impression of the new product of Microsoft :
"New Edge Browser"
I just wanted to take a shallow glance at this browser, and it was horribly awesome in contrary with my expectations.
The design and animations and smooth transitions, ease of migration from chrome and enhanced UI were the things that aroused my interest at the first 5 minutes of usage, as a frontend developer, I'm so much eager to dig up more in it. Share your experience and opinions with me 😉

Tech management and leadership are the most toxic and cancerous folks of any organisation.

In all my past experience, I have encountered nut jobs.

If it were just me, then entire product or design org won't be suffering. What helps me confirm this hypothesis is every engineer who work for such retards is suffering and fighting for their existence.

We have monkey business going on with our CTO and his ass licking engineering head.

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

So this happened when I was interning. We were developing an online application for hospitals. Now as it is with any new product. We had a lot of small issues popping up related changing of text or design colors. Now this piss kissing product manage of ours who has had no prior experience of a product of the scale we were developing started posting issues in the company’s internal whatsapp group. It was fine initially when the issues were less and small. However, when the amount and intensity grew, I suggested that he be given access as a issue poster on the git repo of the code.
Now I couldn’t comprehend his level of douchiness before hand but this guy started posting issued there but only a link to a google doc with the issue described there.
Then when came the time to change the status of these issues, I asked him to verify for his satisfaction that the issue is resolved and mark it as such. So Mr. Shitmenot started to maintain a fucking google sheet to maintain the status of issues and asked us to do the same. And upon demarcation he would manually change the color of the cells representing the issue. Like what the fuck dude.
I complained about this to my mentor who also happened to be he CEO but he couldn’t care less as if it was some debt that he owed the guy.
Safe to say I left the company shortly after things started to get out of hand and more shit began to happen. Yes there was more stuff that happened!!!

You told the design team this won't work on a large scale
Design team: Well we designed it, so, fuck you !
You: Does the implementation...
End Product: * Doesn't work *

Design Team: Why isn't it working, suggest a workaround

* Facepalm *
* Dead Inside *
* Give me Death Note plox *

I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.

It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.

Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:

I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.

Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.

Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!

Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:

So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.

So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)

So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.

So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!

I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Any other IT company is like:

* Task -> Designer -> Markup coder -> Backend -> Finish

Our IT company:

Act I: "Art of setting up contact with idiots".
------
Items:
*Cave scripts (aka "typical task")

Designer: -- "DAFUQ?"
Customer: *gives another interpretation*
Designer: -- "Erm... really? White text on white background?"
Customer: -- "Make a decision by yourself. I was expecting much more independence from you. You are an expert after all."
Designer: -- "Well. I'm making decision by myself. The text will be placed *here* and will be gray-colored, because *bla-bla-bla*"
Customer: -- "I disagree."
Designer: *1 hour of silence later* -- "Well...k."

Act II: "Design meets ar(u)tist"
----

Items:
*Something, that was drawn by dumb kid while smashing his own head against desk. (PSD layout)
* Salt (to pour it on open wounds)

Designer: -- "I'm seeing this task *this way*"
Markup: -- "And how do u think i should get this done? Have you even seen what you made?? This is bullshit!"
Designer: -- "It's not bullshit! It's a sci-fi themed layout!"
Markup: -- "With gameplay elements and graphics from Alien Shooter??"
Designer: -- "Well, I don't care." *brings new edits and changes*
Markup: -- "????"
Designer: *smug face* -- "!!!"

Act III (7 days later, 9 hours till deadline): "Short story about boy, who was trying to hang himself, but instead fell out from window."
----

Items:
*Markup, smelling like it went through hell and back (x1)
* Markup coder with fried butt (x1)

Backend: -- "What. Is. THAT?"
Markup: -- "It's a work we should complete in 9 hours."
Backend: -- "WE?? I know u mean me, but that's a nightmare. What the f*ck were you doing all this time?"
Markup: -- "Well..." *finds out that he was only watching films and sleeping* "I was making this thing up..."
Backend: -- "You mean "f*cking" *this* thing "up"?"
Markup: -- "Not without it"

(*3 hours of edits and changes of color from white to white later*)
Backend: -- "Well, let's do this."
*Picks PHP and tries to bundle it up with MongoDB. After some time tries to rewrite everything to JS and starts shouting something like "F***CK" and looking for window to walk through. Figures out that he is on first floor. And that he is too lazy to go upstairs*

Act IV (3 days after deadline): "Pain and misery":
-----

Items:
*Something covered with insul(t)ating tape. (Final product)

Customer: -- "Really?"
Team: -- "Kinda."
Customer: -- "Well, thanks for your work anyway. It feels like it's going to disassemble right in my hands but it just works. Oh, also, you didnt made this in time, so your payment will be over9000 times lower. That's all"
Backend, on fluids: -- "Well...yeah..."
Markup: -- "Don't look at me like that. I really was doing my job."
Designer, with twitching eye: -- "Huh, I see. You worked so hard that we have nothing to eat now. Thanks for that."
Backend: ...

I used to love my job, the guy that looked forward to mondays, there was always something new to learn, I was passionate about clean code and learning new languages like Elixir. As a software engineer I thought my occupation had a special significance in this world, I saw possibility and potential of creating something so impactful on the world that it would become my legacy.

Now after 5 years I’m realising that none of this stuff really matters to the world, software engineers aren’t special and it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions in sales, medicine or law. My friend who works as in customer success management makes more than me.

While some of us will be in the lucky few whose work will change the world, most of us will just be another cog in the wheel, all that matters is how many product/features you ship out, nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us

I need help and advice!

I currently work as an consultant at a large corporation. Came onboard for 1-2 years to help rebuild one of their platforms. From the beginning the mindset was that the finished product should not be developed based on anything else than customer testimonials and interviews regarding functionality and design. However, they’re building their platform developed and distributed by this other company. Basically they bought a system that is incomplete regarding to being compliant to the specifications brought to them when they decided which system to go with. Now we’re trying to build around all the issue this platform is causing us. The code base for the system is like something a monkey did with their feet. Nothing makes sense and it’s layers on top of layers of 10 year old code. I f-ing hate it. I don’t know what to do. We have some many technical limitation that it’s impossible to create the vision they had from the start.
I’ve been thinking about talking to the highest chief in the department as he has been pissed earlier about project managers not escalating issue to him earlier. But I don’t want to step on anyones toes. Should I leave the project? Should I talk to the chief? What do I do? I’m miserable🤯

Jonny Ive---It's not great design when the first thing most of your iPhone users have to do is mod your product with a case just to use it for its intended purpose.

Especially as the primary purpose of your design seems to be to focus on the visual aesthetic---which is voided by said case.

Developers insist that I give them a sketch file instead of a zeplin doc I'm like ok fine. Then I am told in like three weeks of development that they don't understand the sketch file when they insisted on it. So I'm like ok fine let me put it on zeplin. Then I'm told to compare their work with my designs. And ofcourse it doesn't match. So i sit and literally go through each margin , each padding with them. Then I'm told that they r over riding exsisting styles and say that's alot of development so I say ok I need to ask the product owner if it's gonna take more time. They get mad at me and say why I need to ask this? Like u told me it's gonna take you longer and I need to tell my boss? Then my boss says confirm all the styles with marketing ( everyone btw has seen my designs, reviewed them, and I have confirmed literally every change) and now I've been told to change a button to red ( why r your cta's and errors the same color I have no idea ??!) And then I tell the developers and they make a huge deal about changing the button from blue to red. NO ONE HERE HAS A STRUCTURE TO PRESENT HAND OFF TO THE DELVEOPERS. ITS SO ANNOYING.

Also can I just say in my presentation time and I had spent time on my designs and someone says oh let me show everyone through my screen.

I literally got a word out before all the delveopers in the room start arguing and skipping my design slides like R FO REAL? LET ME GO THROUGH THE JOURNEY ITS MY JOB.
LET ME HAVE CONTROL ON MY DESIGNS
UAIQBA.EAUKWHWUAGWNKRVIEVJWFEJCSJCSJCAHCSHXWH

sorry. I am typing this sitting on a sofa eating cake when I'm supposed to be on a diet but I'm wallowing and crying

"The designer is not always right. The researcher is not always wrong. Profit is not always the motive; market research, whatever its outcome, should never be used as a good excuse for bad design – in the same sense that good design should never be used to promote a bad product." - Paul Rand

Crazy deadlines> Director: "You need to design a new architecture that has failover, multi-AZ, automated deployments, CI/CD pipeline, automated builds/tests as well, for our new SaaS product. You have 3 days to complete it"

Me: "Ok cool. Do we have the new product developed? Can I have the spec docs of the new software, libs and packages required for the env?"

Product Lead: "No we dont have anything yet. The POC is on my local PC, but I dont know what packages are needed to run it"

Me: "So I cant design anything unless I have the minimum requirements to run the new software"

Director: "Just get it up and running in a live environment and we'll take it from there"

Me: *sigh*..this is going to be a big mistake

"People don’t use a product because of the great design; great design helps them use the product." - Viran Anuradha Dayaratne

"1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible" - Dieter Rams

I dont get it... I dont understand what my manager expects me to do when I am not really allowed to make design decisions, but there is no design at all! What are we doing here, manufacturing spaghetti? Today I asked my co-worker what our product should actually do exactly when its finished. He said he is not so sure either. And our manager is now on vacation so we cant ask what exactly he wants...

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

So I was rejected by the management today for promotion to Senior 2 although I have done several major feature developments + infra design and basically end to end ownership.

Reason for no promotion? That's the best fucking part, according to the feedback, the work I performed on the service I created is well-designed,
and the code quality is commendable. However, they pointed out a notable difference in code quality between the micro-service
I built and the rest of the project developed by others. This, apparently, suggests that I lack a strong sense of ownership over the broader product.

First of all, we have super tight deadlines (almost 996), and I burned midnight oil to make sure the service I am in-charge of is designed really well.
Also, how in the flying fuck the other how the inability of others to maintain good code quality elsewhere in the product is being used as evidence against my sense of ownership
and initiative in ensuring high engineering quality for the repository I wasn't even working on

What a delusional management, the entire feedback feels like just an excuse to fuck off, we are not promoting you...
May be instead of doing actual engineering work, I should have just do minimal work and write more design docs / technical artifacts

It is very demoralizing after I worked hard for so many months, product went out really well.. yet when performance review comes, rejected with a petty reason

Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"

"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"

"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"

"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."

"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."

"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."

"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."

"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."

"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"

We got a relatively cheap logic analyzer (we is me and my dad) and we tried finding the drivers for it.

Their website was a dead-end and it didn’t come with any disk or something. Somehow, Seleae’s website had a suitable driver, and it is completely unrelated to the product we bought.

(Seleae is a company that sells god-tier logic analyzers)

WHAT THE FUCK, SPARKFUN?!

Also, regarding the devRant rewrite project I am currently searching for some nice (and practical at the same time) design for the profile view.

So a product manager emailing devs long essays on requirements? how does that sound? Aren't developers just supposed to implement the specifications? Is requirement gathering and design their job too? Maybe I need a new job before I go crazy.

You would think that one might get used to the following scenario, but it still pisses me off every time it happens. I'm getting a design created by the customer that is specific to a pixel-level. The product I create in turn is very close to a 100% match visually and functional. And then a few days later, the work already done, I get renewed versions of the same designs. Just like that. With all those nooks and crannies replaced and new ones added, as if it didn't took time, effort and experience to make them functional in the first place. And no one blinks an eye. Not the customer, not our project managers. So after having me built you intricate card board house, you just smash it and tell me to rebuild? It's not always a huge deal but it happens so often and I guess it's part of the "customer is king" mentality, but it's bullshit. If the customer hands in a final design, then that's it. Any changes afterwards need to be paid extra. Otherwise it feels like I'm wasting my time and those changes will not get the same quality treatment for sure.

"The word design is everything and nothing. The design and the product itself are inseparable." - Jonathan Ive

As someone from the clothing/retail industry, I could never imagen a life within Tech.

I had a shop, it went very well. I had my ups and downs like most shop owners. Since the shop was on not on your typical shopping street, I had to make good relationships with my customers.

I enjoy talking to people, listen to peoples opinions, their day to day activities etc. After some years I really needed some much needed improvement to the administration and overall solutions. Checking around the internet I found some tools but expensive, or tools without those stuff I really needed.

As a can-do:er I am, I thought I would hook some tech people up and sell my idea, so they could make the product while I design it. They started build it, I watch. But they were busy all the time, no time to build something else. They taught me some code and suddenly, I was back at school learning to code.

And now, I'm a system developer. Really enjoying programming and the amazing world of technology. Even when I mostly talk to people over the web :')

Name a shittier API to hook into than Magento's REST API.

Protip: You can't.

[bit of context]
Building 3rd party integrations via their REST API and keep unearthing "WTF?!" architectural design moments. For example: Pulling down products tells you if it has a configurable parent (product to store all master options, etc)... but fuck me if I want to know what the sku of that parent is, or any other means of accessing it!

How the fuck M2 is such a major eCommerce platform is beyond me. WooCommerce in comparison however: Beautiful API, Beautiful documentation, a couple of limitations, no big deal. I love WooCommerce.

M2 makes me question why the hell I became a dev sometimes.

Product presentation for a new module in our software suit in 5 hours.
And just now I got an email from my boss, asking if I could add the gui revamp we were planning for next version today...for the presentation...it's just a UI after all.

But yes of course, obviously I do magic and can design, implement and test a new UI from the ground...in less than 3 hours. Because we have to leave early.

Sometimes...

I keep forgetting to design for the failure path, so my product is an accurate depiction of society, where everybody has a convenient excuse to not handle issues and the slightest problem ends up collapsing everything.

So what exactly does "Learning" mean in a tech industry?

From my experience,
"learning" from college's pov
"Welcome to the class. your parents has paid us already for this. Now we are supposed to stand here for next 6 months, study very slowly and learn about the topics of our curriculum and give a test on it. we might as well make a good nice project to check our knowledge"
(worst college will also add "Sorry the above message was just fiction, i am here to drink tea & enjoy my day,while you guys are here to enjoy,mark attendance and get a degree because we only care about our reputation and we are gonna pass you anyway")

"learning" from startups pov:
"Here is an idea, here is a design, here is your months salary and here is your deadline.
Make a 100% polished,working product out of it before the deadline. You are solely responsible for this project and you have to figure out on your own how to make our fantasy idea into reality before deadline hits( else you are shit).
This way you learn.
We will also provide you with a free all time learning course on how to be fine without getting any respect for your hardwork and tolerate our insults, which will help you in the life long journey of dealing assholes.
Our company is great and providing you an amazing learning opportunity, kiss our feet."
(worst startups will also add "We don't have/ wont provide you any seniors to help you with this stuff, the internet is your source of truth"/ "if you don't hit the deadline, your salary will get deducted"/ "work on weekends to hit the deadline")

"Learning" from an MNC pov (never really experienced those but from what i have heard):
"Welcome to our company. we here provide you with a similar experience as that of your shitty college during training period and then put you in low brain-ish low paying repetitive job for life until you leave us or we find a replacement for your work or salary"

I just think about it ...
Running docker on windows is shit
Running nginix on windows is boofff
Running apache on windows is boofff
Running WWS on windows is hugly

Install linux
All server software run like king
Don't have access to any adobe product for design and micro$hit office for client sanity because ODF is to special, i want my docx i said ... Like what do you want from me ... Shit the dev setup is a fucking mess because some enterprises don't want to wet itself in the futur...

Microsoft love linux BULLSHIT

I've been in the world of code for about three years now, introduced into it through a design project.

However, I've only just started to actually write code and there's SO much I need to learn. SO much I hadn't even heard of.

You'd think managing a project would expose you to the extremities and the specifics of development but nope, it doesnt, atleast for the project / product manager.

My previous "liking" for code is clearly now turning into a "passion" as instead of watching live streams on Twitch, I'm watching "An introduction to Elixir" / "WTF is Meteor."

Why are the damned Spaniards so small? Because of them I am unable to sit in the newer trains that go around the Netherlands. The angled headrests (they are supposed to kinda wrap around the head). But these headrests start below my shoulders and my head then floats above the headrest. This causes my shoulders to be folded together.

FU you spaniards (no offense to everyone who didn't design trains), if you can't take in consideration what the average length of the users is you have failed as a product designer.

Yes I am tall (1.95m) but not really above average around here (maybe a cm or so)

I have become the only thing I always hated in a developer. Building a project without a proper documentation.
As a solo developer in a company where I have to do database architecture, front-end, back-end, testing, NETWORKING (I am the most ignorant guy when it comes to networking), product design, there is no time for documentation.

But hey, I have structured the project, files and functions (with comment, parameters type and return type) properly and I understand what I've done even after 4-5 months without touching that specific project so I got that going for me which is nice... I guess.

During the course of my career I've stumbled on like 6-7 people I've worked with and it was really great. Every now and then we meet up and chat how it'd be great to form a team again and work on something (we're all in different companies atm).

Lately we've been mentioning that even more and are considering whether to start working on a product/find clients and form an agency/join some other company.

We have experience with both outsource and products. Our profiles range from development, design, marketing, UX, HR, PM.

Any road we take has pros and cons. We're least fit to start on a product because we'd need more profiles, have to figure out finance and would probably have to work alongside our current jobs.

I've been thinking of writing a joint letter when I hear a company is opening up an office in our city. When that happens, usually whole teams are formed and most of the profiles I mentioned are needed.

Do you think that's even possible? Is there another way we're overseeing? Have you heard of or attempted something similar?

Any advice is truly appreciated.

(TL;DR at bottom)
Does anyone else feel that modern GUI's or webpages or anything thats 2-D and modernized, just seem to contain 10x less data that old interfaces.
Disclaimer: First time uploading picture, idk how it will go)
Let's say Google's Inbox, compared to the old Gmail interface... (In attached picture)

I am the only one annoyed by this?

I really like the look and everything and I love modern designs, but please please, keep the functionality there. I just feel like there is 10x less options to do when I see a system converted to a new modernized design. Even YouTube look ugly now, that I am convinced there are about 10 buttons less under each video.
(New <-> Old in attached picture)

Thinking objectively, all of the buttons are still there, but from other experiences, I just always get discouraged when I see a product with a minimalistic design, and am immediately turned away from it, expecting that I wont have any sort of ability to customize my settings.

If you say that fancier GUI's take too much work to make all he settings, the fucking don't make a modern GUI... I want something I can tailor to my needs... There is always a good line in between, just like "old" youtube's design...

Maybe thats why I hated LastPass with it's fancy GUI's and instead preferred KeePass for my passwords...

As promised:

TL;DR
Anyone else hate modern GUI's since they usually lack features?

Design PRD based on competitor's product :|

Was wondering what kind of workflow you use.
My team is currently a big unorganized chaos...
Our manager wants us to take the form of:
Feature idea -> Design -> Build -> Test -> Train (explain to users how to use it) -> Deploy

The `Train` step is something rather odd to me, as that would mean teaching every single employee how to use the product we're making.

Wouldn't it just be better to skip the `train` section (and maybe use some kind of wiki?) and try to make everything as clearly labeled and obvious as possible?

So I am a Software Engineer at a small scale company.
I need to coordinate with customers, understand the requirements and design and develope the solutions.
These sometimes include changing the current product a bit and customize it to fit the client needs or maybe creating a plug-in that could work with the current product and get the job done.

I love the research, design and planning part of the job, I would be super focused and will find solutions for complex stuff. Plan it all to the smallest things.
I know the solution so I can think of what code would be there what would be needede whats already there etc.

But when it comes to coding the solution my laziness kicks in.
My mind is like you already know the solution why you need to code it to.

Then I start procrastinating and end up putting myself under a pile of stuff when the deadline approaches.

FML

Good Morning Folks!!!

I haven't been posting in a while, besides the fact that I went thru a crazy psychiatric crisis 6 weeks ago, there have not been much news to share here.

Now, recovering and working again luckily, I have to face again the stupid pointy haired boss.

So, this fucker asked me for an estimation to build a simple web app.
He: Hey, can you make an estimation for this app
Me: sure, here it is.
He: *to the client*, here's the estimation for the web app you requested
Client: Uhmm, can I haz desktop for winbug$??
He: Let me check with dev
Me: Sure why not, we can do F# using MVU which is basically the same as using modern web frameworks
He: Sure, I'll tell that to the client.
Client: Oooohhh, C#, we lovez C#, can I haz discount?
He: Client wants discount to make it in C#.
Me: Oh, you can give him a discount to make it in F#, I never said C#
He: But your cv says you used C# ten years ago.
Me: Sure, but is not keeping up with functional design patterns, which is what I do.
He: Ok, so I'm offering him the discount in F#
Me: Great.
He: So, project is approved, thanks for the discount, you have 3 weeks to present the product in C#.
Me: Sure, I'll start when I get the downpayment.

Me: I'm considering saying that I didn't understand that he wanted it in C#, and just do F# and not let him know until the project is done.

Thoughts??

I feel like IE is an example of a deep rooted demon beast that spawns fucktarded bloat transpilers like BABEL.
When companies try to invent their own wheels, or do their own thing is when the pits of developer hell start to spawn such fucking convoluted fucktarded bullshit.

Abstract to Design:
I'm trying to think of a world where things are standardized, as boring as it sounds... Imagine if companies weren't so fucktarded with greedy smoke and mirrors, and they all contributed to making a single product standardized and workable, and improve on that product... Like a physics "Standard model" but for each product invented.

But no... here we are... 20 million ways to accomplish one similar task, with 20 million different designs, with majority adhering to their own flaws... or planned obsolecence... 10 million booby traps of consumer remorse.

Why do we do this as a society just to make some bastard company's profit margin go up, so they can keep competing in the "free market" of fuck all fuckery?

I get it.. yea... innovation... sure..
but sometimes innovation is just a means to and end of sanity, especially when they are proprietary, and especially when that proprietary shit turns to, well... shit!

In a perfect world, things will be designed open-sourced, compatible, and improved upon without "breaking" changes... but this is virtually impossible without standardization of the VERY fundamental components. But then those components can be improved, and might be smaller/lighter/more efficient by design, and simply wont work with the old versions without drastic "TRANSPILATION"

I suppose this is the way it is always going to be... Neverending stream of design "improvements". I suppose being a developer in todays world is a bittersweet existence... unless you're just trying to make ends meet... in that case. I think I might be in hell.

Take a look at web-dev today with all the "improvements" ... it's literally turned into a jungle of FUCK MY LIFE. A giant dick waiving contest with all these dicks colliding against each other in cluster fuck bombardment.

God help us all.... and now back to coding.

Visual Studio causes Covid!

Well, not really, but it surely disrupts life!

It is a damned shame that a product that promises so much is so flaky!

I have abandoned attempts to use it.

-loses form design
-fails to recognise break points
-changes target configuration on it’s own
-JUST PLAIN SUCKS!!!!
NOT USESBLE

There is a side project that they've been working on. The CEO laid out the details to the Product Owner and Tech Lead. Now what he wants to happen is beyond the scope of the business core itself and it would take months to do the changes just to make the side project work. Now both of them ask the timeline for this, CEO said 1 week. 1 fucking week (he's a dev in his glory days which is why the short timeline). He know proceeds to suggest to us how we should do it (like he normally does). But Tech Lead knows better. So with the help of one of the junior devs, they proceed with the Tech Lead's plan. Now come for updates, they presented that its working and such. The CEO became furious as to why they decided to design it that way (of course you dingus, you gave them 1 week and expect quality). Now what triggered me was 2 things, first is his comment on the way they designed it. Its "flawed design". WTF ARE YOU EXPECTING? YOU ARE A FORMER DEV. YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER. Second, is the junior dev is asking me about the project. WHY IS HE ASKING ME. I always tell him that ask Tech Lead. Some of his questions should have been answered by Tech Lead. He even questions the design itself(why they designed it the way they did). I DON'T EVEN KNOW WTF Y'ALL BEEN TALKING ABOUT THIS PROJECT AND YOU'RE ASKING ME. Flawed design, more like flawed communication.

It's so common to find pretty designed websites with shit usability. What's the point? To show off the design skills or to sell the product?

Urgh.. the amount of things you have to know as a developer.. it can get stressful and frustrating sometimes when (in-depth) technology knowledge is demanded from you (for instance, for a job position)..
It's like being a doctor, being a lifelong student.

A few examples of what I had to know during my career:
Java, .NET, Python, PHP, JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3, Sass/Less, Node.js, ReactJS, AngularJS, Vue.js, Cordova, Ionic, Android, design patterns, SOLID, databases (design, implementation, administration, both NoSQL and relational,..), deployment tools (Octopus, Jenkins,..), VCS, CI/CD, HTTP, networking, security (OAuth2, CORS, XSS, CSRF,..), algebra, algorithms, software testing, profiling, Linux, Unix, Windows, MS Office (advanced mail filtering,..), ITIL, IT Law (licensing and its implications when choosing a product, distribution right,..), server architecture,..

Sure yeah, I know, I've studied all that at university but.. it's been too long (almost a decade now). I have to revisit that knowledge.

"A lot of companies have tried to support designers by giving them 'a seat at the table.' What this usually means in practice, however, is that a designer is sitting at the table well after the important product decisions that influence the design have been made. This is usually where complicated and muddy designs are born. " - Rebekah Cox

You have to love systems people who tell software people how the software works. Especially when you are trying to tell them why a problem is occurring in the software. Like software guy is like:

"this is breaking because a number is getting overwritten in the system by a product we interface with and have no control over"

"Well you need to stop the number from getting overwritten"

"then we're going to have to overhaul the design of the system"

"you don't have to redesign the system, you just need to circumvent the product that is overwriting the number"

"Yeah, a design change."

Dude is the interim system lead and starting to get uppity. Even though it's his group that is behind which is why we are driving changes to the system rather than them.

What use is a frontend developer (having exclusively frontend development knowledge) that's not a designer / isn't good at design.
Sorry if I'm being harsh, but you're either a web developer, knowing how to build web apps (or websites, or whatever), or a UX developer or whatever, knowing how to do pretty (and usable and accessible and...) things. Or even both.
Lemme say it differently. You either come from a web design and build a frontend, or come from the development of an application (database, logic, architecture, APIs, etc., backend++) and build a frontend for it. Again, or both.
Not being able to design, and not being able to build a product, is just... nothing? You're in the middle.
Sorry, but I don't think you're a developer. Maybe a coder.

Sigh Im getting depressed from going to work whilst a few weeks ago it gave me a bunch of happines.

I think its due that management is approaching a triple deadline (?!?!?!) project in an agile/scrum way (?!?!??!)..

We can not change our data model completely when we have to be in acceptance in 3 weeks and do a demo in a few days..

Yes we can work around that but fuck database design theory and lets ignore all primary keys and foreign keys, great idea

We have to create and prioritise user stories on our own? We have two product owners and a scrum master.

Scrum master offers to deal with organising and creating tickets to organise Infrastructure without having a laptop of the client, so no Service Now access or any other system..

Guess who has to do it in the end..

Many question marks about this project

Current design philosophy is that the user should be presented with fewer options, fewer ways to do things. Users shouldn't be empowered to created what they want, but should be "guided" into building what we (software designers) think they should have. That is almost verbatim from our company's product and C level officers and is echoed without deviation by product owners and strategists in our company. Holy crap what a bunch of presumptuous, arrogant, idiots. That holier than thou attitude promotes disdain for the customer: "the customer doesn't know better, so let's prevent them from doing it any way but X." The focus is entirely on what's easier for us, not what helps the user solve their problems. That's not a service oriented anymore, that just a bunch of pretentious dickheads that are on the road to losing customers.

Broadly there are two things which concerns me:

1: Clients' businesses fail miserably or change their direction.

2: Instead of focusing and improving the quality of their work/product, they prioritise remaining things instead.

BONUS: Don't forget those individuals who dream really big but fails to take any action towards it, just talking. I stay away from these people personally.

Because of these reasons design gets vanished or no longer valid for their new business venture, and don't forget the time and dedication it took to create, as a freelancer it hurts a bit.

I like working for non-profit organisations, most of them look for volunteers. Your work and efforts are alive, and you have to be jack of all trades IMO when dealing with them. Additionally in the process you will meet some extraordinary individuals.

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

Story of my life - Feature creep, creeping featurism or featuritis is the ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, such as in computer software. These extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and can result in software bloat and over-complication rather than simple design.

My client will not let me design a product before making it live.... "Make it live so I can see it, then I will fuck about with the design (pixel by pixel) and THEN I will work out what the product should actually do."
WTF?!
Oh and when I do insist on designing before building, they insist on me doing that in POWERPOINT..!!
Why am I still doing this fucking job?

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.

Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.

Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.

The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)

It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.

Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.

You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:

1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries

2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc

From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.

This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.

So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.

Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P

Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.

And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.

I don't know maybe it's me. I'm sure that at booking.com they have hundred of GUI/UX/UI experts, product owners, A/B testing and whatever.

So, please, can you explain to me in a professional and scientific why, why the fuck, when I search for an hotel in a place for a date, by default, they show me UNAVAILABLE properties?

Like, "hey sorry, there was this great hotel, right in the center and very cheap, but you missed it!! hahahaha, you poor moron"

And every time I have to ACTIVATE the fucking filter myself "only show available properties".

Excuse me? Who want to see in first position the hotels that are NOT available?

Are there some users out there who wants that? If I were hired at booking.com as Product Owner or UX/UI expert, I think the first thing I'll propose is to quit the fucking filter whatsoever or at least to enable it by design.

So why is that? you want to show off? slap me in the face, with your hard cock-list of hotels you have anyway, but not for me?

How would you call this role? Product Owner? Graphics Designer?, Both? Neither?

I work for a small startup besides university and we do need a person responsible for how site looks. But then again we also need a product owner for the frontend. So why not combine these roles? A person who's responsable as product owner for all the frontend related bits plus does the designing. Initially this person would work with just one frontend dev, possibly more over time.

Question:
- How would you call this role/job?
- What would be an appropriate salary?
- How would you evaluate an application to this role?

Generally have great experience with our management.
I work at a scale-up, so I've had some run-ins with the founder shifting priorities too often in the early days, but he's got enough notion of tech to understand when we're telling about the why(not)s of what we can and can't do
A while back we got a product owner/manager/scrum master and he's great too. I've had times when he put pressure on making deadlines when it was really not helping, but overall great guy with a lot of empathy and respect for his team.

But recently I've been starting to feel like we (the dev team) are getting more and more excluded from the decision-making process of the features & designs that we're going to be working on. We used to have a say in what we felt like was a good idea for a feature or a design, but it feels to me like we don't get asked that question any more of late...

Not sure if I'm imagining it, or overreacting to a logical (possibly positive?) evolution in our development workflow...

Hey dude, don't try to sneak a random piece of design in this project then force eng and product to argue wtf. We'll do whatever the company wants and y'all agree to, but seriously fuck that drama.

I own my phone number over two years and still can’t sign up in Venmo, I really feel their app have problems: No different use email or phone number sign up! After I wrote a letter for them, they asked me three months of my phone number status, so number verify mean nothing on your app? Did everyone need three months status to prove phone number? !
I just feel such a popular app but the product design sucks!

Compromise.

I think that sums up development pretty much.

Take for example coding patterns: Most of them *could* be applied on a global scale (all products)… But that doesn't mean you *should* apply them. :-)

Find a matching **compromise** that makes specific sense for the product you develop.

Small example: SOLID / DRY are good practices. But breaking these principles by for example introducing redundant code could be a very wise design decision - an example would be if you know full ahead that the redundancy is needed for further changes ahead. Going full DRY only to add the redundancy later is time spent better elsewhere.

The principle of compromise applies to other things, too.

Take for example architecture design.

Instead of trying to enforce your whole vision of a product, focus on key areas that you really think must be done.

Don't waste your breath on small stuff - cause then you probably lack the strength for focusing on the important things.

Compromise - choose what is *truly* important and make sure that gets integrated vs trying to "get your will done".

Small example: It doesn't really matter if a function is called myDingDong or myDingDongWithBells - one is longer, other shorter. Refactoring tools make renaming a function an easy task. What matters is what this function does and that it does this efficiently and precise. Instead of discussing the *name* of the function, focus on what the function *does*.

If you've read so far and think this example is dumb: Nope... I've seen PR reports where people struggled for hours with lil shit while the elephant in the room like an N+1 problem / database query or other fundamental things completely drowned in the small shit discussion noise.

We had code design, we had architecture... Same goes for people, debugging, and everything else.

Just because you don't like what weird person A does, doesn't mean it's shit.

Compromise. You don't have to like them. Just tolerate them. Listen. Then try to process their feedback unbiased. Simple as that. Don't make discussions personal - and don't isolate yourself by just working with specific persons. Cause living in such a bubble means you miss out a lot of knowledge and insight… or in short: You suck because of your own choices. :-)

Debugging... Again compromise: instead of wasting hours on debugging a problem, ASK for help. A simple: Has anyone done debugging this before or has some input for how to debug this problem efficiently?... Can sometimes work wonders. Don't start debugging without looking into alternative solutions like telemetry, metrics, known problems etc.
It could be a viable, better long term solution to add metrics to a product than to debug for hours ... Compromise. Find a fitting approach to analyze a problem instead of just starting a brute force approach.

....

Et cetera et cetera.

I’ve been interviewing at a few companies lately. I’m a dev with ~6 years of experience with a specific language. Most of the experience comes from working in companies that developed their own software, not talking about cms stuff. Analytical, data tracking systems. Now working at a fintech. I’ve got an offer to work as a senior developer in a smaller tech team, with more salary. I’ve approached the current company about the offer and they told me that they don’t think I’m a senior dev and rather a strong mid level dev. The Hr also told me to think about if I’m really a senior and if the other companies expectations would be met. They would increase my salary, but not quite match it. It’s not too far off though. Their reasoning for this was that you need a lot of experience with their product (which does not correlate with seniorness of a developer, only the worth of specific employees for a company IMHO) and system architecture design. The problem is that we don’t see any tasks that could implement any system design for as log as I’ve worked here, so I don’t see how I could work into a senior role at this company. Of course imposter syndrome kicked in and I’m triple guessing myself if I should join the other company as a senior now. How should I aproach this? The current company is stressful to work at because of big workload, a lot of my coworkers think the same thing about the workload.

Reading some system design study materials.

Unless it's literally a startup from scratch. I feel like that proper response to the "design youtube/twitter" question should be: I really hope your product team comes up with better requirement than just design a product, get to it

What do you think of the Database design of Drupal/WordPress? They use 2 tables for 85% of the data!! Product, pages, whatever are all stored in the same 2 tables. Does that work out better than having each content type in separate tables?

I'm thinking of making an ERP. Would that table structure work there?

What if you could create a company where every member is an engineer. (HR, Marketing, Graphic Design) all done by engineers.

Perhaps, no one would understand the product. It's like Apple full of Wozniaks and no Jobs.

Group project at uni, we're learning how to do scrum sprints. So here's a small story about all the ways it can go wrong.

We assign scrum master and product owner roles, what do those do? "We want to do design tho" they say two weeks later.

I end up doing the organization part and structuring the backlog.
"Alright, you guys will be the frontend team, your tasks are X and Y"
No response
One day before the review I ask again
"So, what's the status" (well knowing that they didn't do shit so far)
They start scrambling around, and manage to do like 30% of their tasks at best, I end up doing most of the work for them.

Next week, new sprint, our tutors somehow don't notice that literally 95% of the code has been written by me so far.
"Alright team, hopefully you will do better this time, so and so will be your subteam leader since he knows this stuff"
No response
Some guys start working on independent things without collaborating with each other, sometimes replicating stuff I already did (but obviously worse).

So that's the situation so far, I really would rather kill myself than keep working with these guys, jeeesus

Product designer keeps on changing designs and managers approve it every single time. Totally frustrated to work. Why can't they think of scenarios based on design? Why should they allow me work on something guaranteeing that things won't be changed but change every single time.

I know product specs change, but too much of change frustrates the developer. Why does no body care for developer's mindset?

I work in a small team. As the senior dev I tens to focus on important tasks that shape the core of the product but some times I can’t divide my self when there are multiple tasks at hand, so I pass some tasks to the an other mid level dev.

So the task was to create an automation in order to CD (continuously deliver) an order from WHMCS of the (git versioned) product to customers UAT, PROD envs.

To get a background this is an old guy with “constricted” experience in PHP/jQuery/Joomla/Wordpress.

So when we were breaking up the tasks he told me he would like to implement this so i gave him the task as i was busy with core features.

I was like what could go wrong? I know he doesn’t know much about CI/CD but he can read right? He will google right? He will search for CI/CD solutions that do this out of the box right? He will design on paper or what ever and do small POCs right? He will design the flow first before starting the implementation right? RIGHT?

So fast forward to today I had a call with him this morning about some DB staff. And he wanted to show me his progress…

His solution is:
(parentheses is my brain)
1. Customer completes WHMCS order (perfect)
2. Web Hook 🪝 action (YES)
3. cpanel gets source and “automatic!” Init, all using pure PHP code ignoring the usage of the current framework (ok… something is missing)
4. cpanel web hooks(?) WHMCS to send email to customer with the envs initial setup page(?)
5. Customer opens link and adds setup info (ok fuck, fuck, fuck)

(Ok stay cool composed, lets ask some questions maybe he thought it all in a cool way I can’t get my mind around)

Me: So how are you gonna get the correct version from the repo to the env and init the correct schema?

Dev: I haven’t thought about it yet.

Me: Are we gonna save each version to a file system then your code is going to fetch them?

Dev: I haven’t really thought about it we will see. But look on customer init user setup I implemented a password strength validation and it also checks if the password is the same.

So after this Pokémon encounter I politely closed teams. Stood up drank some (a lot) coffee ☕️. Put out the washed laundry while reflecting on life’s good things, while listening to classical music 🎼 .

Then I sat on my office chair drank some more coffee, put some linking park starting with in that order:
“Numb” then “What I’ve Done” and ended with “In the end, it does really fucking matter”

You don't know how much knowledge in this picture...

Working as a Dev for a while now, I tell new people not to bother with it. There is never any job satisfaction as people in charge never understand the basics.

Instead of learning to write efficient code, figure out how to solve real business problems, work towards a maintainable flexible product to quickly deliver value on changing requirements, write automated tests to improve quality, maintainability and prevent live issues - basically do anything a good Dev strives for - you will just constantly end up working for people with no interest beyond the next couple days, on a shit code base that no one can understand, with people that don't want to learn anything about software design and just check boxes off.

Apart from pay this must be the worst career possible in a technical field.

"There are too many elements on most web pages to affix or align each one to the baseline grid. Doing so would require a mathematical rigor that, if it can be achieved, might produce rationally exact measurements and placements but will most likely be something less than elegant. The result would be a design driven by math, rather than a design that uses math to create an elegant product." - Khoi Vinh

2nd week at my first job after I got my papers and what am I doing?

Background:
I followed a course of three years where all we learnt was web development with php and javascript. I of course wanted more and spend hours after school learning as much as a could without any help from others.

About the course:
We learn to tinker with code (php, javascript).
There was never a mention of design patterns.
We never got to know about TDD (test driven development).

Now:
Got the papers, found a job as a c# junior development and am currently working on a C# .NET web app using azure cloud and high standards using unit tests to provide a product for the awesome company I work at which should generate a stable income.

Tldr;
Hard work pays off.

1. write down requirements. what exactly do i want?
2. paint possible solution. how could the finished product look like? while doing this i think through each step of the application and often adjust step 1 until i think 'this is it'
3. design model. how could the database look like. what structure do i need?
4. define milestones. What to do first?
5. Start and keep 1-4 up to date

Some background:

About 2 months ago, my company wanted to build a micro service that will be used to integrate 3 of our products with external ticketing systems.

So, I was asked to take on this task. Design the service, ensure extendability and universality between our products (all have very different use cases, data models and their own sets of services).

Two weeks of meetings with multiple stakeholders and tech leads. Got the okay by 4-6 people. Built the thing with one other guy in a manner of a week. Stress tested it against one ticketing service that is used in a product my team is developing.

Everyone is happy.

Fast forward to last Thursday night.

“Email from human X”: hey, I extended the shared micro service for ticketing to add support for one of clients ghetto ticketing systems. Review my PR please. P.S. release date is Monday and I am on a personal day on Friday.

I’m thinking. Cool I know this guy. He helped me design this API. He must’ve done good. . . *looks at code* . . . work..... it’s due... Monday? Huh? Personal day? Huh?

So not to shit on the day. He did add much needed support for bear tokens and generalized some of the environment variables. Cleaned up some code. But.... big no no no...

The original code was written with a factory pattern in mind. The solution is supposed to handle communication to multiple 3rd parties, but using the same interfaces.

What did this guy do wrong? Well other than the fact that he basically put me in a spot where if I reject his code, it will look like I’m blocking progress on his code...

His “implementation” is literally copy-paste the entire class. Add 3 be urls to his specific implementation of the API.

Now we have

POST /ticket
PUT /ticket
POST /ticket-scripted
PUT /ticket-scripted
POST /callback

The latter 3 are his additions... only the last one should have been added in reality... why not just add a type to the payload of the post/put? Is he expecting us to write new endpoints for every damn integration? At this rate we might as well not have this component...

But seriously this cheeses me... especially since Monday is my day off! So not only do I have to reject this code. I also have to have a call now with him on my fucking day off!!!!

Arghhhhhh