Receives email from warranty guy in work.

Warranty: "Hi, see attached scan in PDF form.
I normally fill the boxes in manually, scan as pdf to myself and then email it on to the higher ups, but they now say they need it in excel form from now on! Can you convert it for me?"

Me: "It looks like your scan's quality isn't good enough for a convert to excel.
Where do you get the original form?
Is it from a website?"

Warranty: "Hang on and ill send you an email with the file and give you a call"

*receives email and a phone call"

Warranty:
"There you go. Theres an excel sheet in that email. what do i do?"

Me: "So.... just so I understand the question... you just fill in this excel sheet, scan as pdf and send it on... but they want it sent as an excel form and not a pdf?"

"Yes."

"So.... Could you not just fill in the excel sheet and email it to them?"

"What do you mean?"

"....fill in the excel sheet as normal, and go to file, share and email... send the original one on."

"And what would that do?"

"...you... you'd be sending the form as an excel sheet, as requested??"

Warranty: *silence for 10 seconds* Oh, i see now. I get you! You're a genius! Well done for figuring it out. Thanks a million!!"

O.O

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

Freelancing website be like: I need a Rolls Royce with high-quality leather and with perfect temperature control. I will also need a mini fridge for my champagne bottle and two wine glass holders. I don't think there's a lot of work to be done in it. It's an easy job.

Budget: $30

!rant source: LinkedIn;
Yesterday I met with a potential client who wanted a website. I gave him a quote of X. He said, do this work for X/2 as I have lots of projects and I can keep you engaged for months.

If it was 2 years ago, I'd have happily accepted his proposal. But in the past 2 years I have learned this lesson hard way. Don't work for clients who don't pay well, because when a developer is not paid enough, the quality of work degrades. Hence the portfolio is degraded and so the future projects are also of low budget.

And before you know it, you will be surrounded by low paying clients who see you as a Skilled Labour.

Today, I don't negotiate, not even a single dollar. To justify my cost I make sure that no stones are left unturned while delivery.

It's better to work for 10 hours a week for 40$/hr then to work 40 hours a week for 10$/hr.

I worked at a startup. They wanted to "save" money. So they hired a relative of "Fred" named "Bubba". Bubba made a custom website. Like hand built gifs and who knows how hand crafted html. It was fine for a time. Then somebody was wondering why nobody was calling us at the company. No customers. Another relative named "George" (who was actually a business major) looked at the website. It had been hacked and replaced with Jedis fighting Sith Lords. Me and another engineer named "Zeus" said "fuck this shit" and said "we are redoing this shit".

So I logged into godaddy (I know, shitty) and installed Wordpress (kinda shitty). I proceeded to turn wordpress into a half decent page. Wiped out the shit that was there, reused images as it made sense. Created more images. Reduced images to 80% quality to take loading size from 10MB to <1MB. Then I also proceeded to do SEO work and get the website listed properly within about a month. Customers started calling all the time. I had a simple contact form that barely gets any shit on it due to captcha. The was 5 years ago. I left 3 years ago (still help them on weekends) and nobody has done shit with the website. They are still getting calls and it hasn't been hacked.

We don't talk to Bubba. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing. I wonder if he still does websites for his relatives. I honestly had no clue what I was doing, but my take on the approach was easier to maintain and even George and Zeus and the new manager "Ralph" can maintain it, kinda. Went from shitty static website to full on dynamic and interactive. Yeah, I know, "dynamic". But the manager was happy.

Sometimes you just do what you gotta do in addition to doing all the electrical and software engineering for a company.

!dev && feelsbadman

I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.

Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.

The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)

Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.

So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.

They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.

But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.

And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*

I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.

I wish y'all a nice week.

devRant on a HoloLens!

The HoloLens is really cool, I was allowed to use it after a short hackathon. I am still surprised, but it works great and the concept feels natural after a short moment - web browsing is not recommended as no website is optimized for mixed reality (yet?).

Sorry for the low quality photo (it is not the compression algorithm's fault this time).

Alright so listen to this. I was working on a project, it was a fork of another github repo. So the project is mainly based in PHP, simple enough right?

Anyways I have my version working and I put it up as a website and am doing fairly well with it. I was trying to advertise it a bit on reddit ( pay attention to the trying ) then someone comes along and asks how I made it and all that.

Just trying to be kind I tell them what I used and all that to make it. Then they come back a few hours later explaining that they are trying to make their own version for "fun". Then they proceed to explain that they are having some issues with it, it obviously is something in the back-end (they must've fucked up something).

So I politely ask them to show me the code so I can help them fix it.

He refuses.

So we exchanged a bit. What his excuse for not showing me his code ( Keep in mind he is also taking this from an open-source software same as me he has simply broken something and can't fix it himself ) is he doesn't want me stealing his ideas...

I nearly snapped when he did that, I had already seen the site he made, from that end it wasn't anymore spectacular than mine and no serious changes seemed to have occurred. The best part is that it was broken. He asked for my help and refused to let me see the code so I told him that I simply couldn't help him fix it then. He goes and is just going alright.

Next he then asks me how I solved this issue and that issue and he wanted the code that I used to fix each of these little issues. Pretty much to the point that it would've been a clone of my site. So I just didn't give him anything.

Didn't hear from him for a few hours, next thing I know he messages me asking if he can fix my site so it is mobile friendly...First off my site is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I have been spending a lot more quality time to work on this than him.

Moral of the story is, some people are retards.

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

Why does every kid developer have a dark theme fetish? I started programming on a Commodore 64. It was dark. It's the quality of the shit you write that defines you assholes, not the color theme of your editor.

Now that that's off my chest, some poos soul has dared to send his resume to me. One of his projects is a website that is being marked by my ENS as a phishing website. I am about to invite him for an interview, and am willing to bet his everything will be dark because he wants to impress me.

HP sucks because:
shitty hinges,
shitty build quality,
shitty USB ports,
shitty customer service,
shitty website

I really like the new Microsoft's WinUI website.

You have an instant insight of the quality of their UI.

YouTube. Hate and love for it just like I would for an abusive partner.

Ads!
Wanna build a website with Wix? Fuck no!
Wanna manage WordPress over SSH? Fuck no!
.. well I kind of do but a turd remains a turd regardless of how it's maintained. WordPress can go die from a torture as long as the time everyone has wasted on it loading already. So no, I don't give a flying fuck about WordPress' new interface.
Wanna buy a new Samsung phone despite just having bought a OnePlus already? YOUTUBE, HOW ABOUT YOU GO FUCK YOURSELF AND YOUR SHITTY ALGO?!!

Quality videos though, so many engineering videos and all for free. How amazing is that? I quite like them.

But if I try to like a video and particularly the fucking comments on it, don't you fucking dare putting your fat fingers 1 pixel next to the like button, because then obviously you want to reply to the comment and have a pop-up with the whole comment and all its replies, and an automatically popped up text input field, just so you have to tap back 2 times just to try liking the bloody comment again. Rinse and repeat that 2 times at best, 5 times at worst. What's not to like, right?!

God fucking dammit. At least now I know why those random mentions without any meaningful other text are there in most comment sections. Usability over 9000!!!

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *

30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."

My first reaction:

"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."

Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.

Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.

I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?

Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.

Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!

I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"

I work for a web agency.
Over the last 18 months a company asked us about 5 different quotes for rather minimal changes to their website.
While being minimal changes, estimating costs for them still requires several hours of work for research, meetings, correspondance and writing the damn things. They never even gave us a response (neither positive nor negative), except once where they told us that they wouldn't pay for project management because their instructions are so clear that PM isn't necessary.

As a response to the last one, after several months, they send us a 10 pages long pdf with requirements for a new website (or a "restyle" like they call it, even if it has absolutely nothing in common with the current one).
We inform them that we can't permit ourselves to continue studying new solutions for free and therefore tell them that a detailed offer would cost them something like 300$, and that amount would then be discounted from the eventually accepted job. We also roughly estimate a price range of about 15k - 20k for the new website.

We get an email back, from the CEO (until now it was a secretary), with essentially 3 arguments written in condescending form:
1. he brags about his revenue being over 9 billion $$$ a year, and that being a part of a global holding for which "communication is essential" (sic.) means that they need to coordinate and "can't simply accept an offer" [even if it's 400$, for specific change exactly requested by them, I guess...]

2. 15k is too much [... for the website representing this 9 billion dollar holding on the internet, for which the requirements are written in the 10 pages long pdf]

3. He asks for a meeting

We accept the meeting, we go to their office.

When we arrive there, the secretary informs us that the CEO will not participate. So we talk the her and the head of the "Communication Dept" in videoconference.
I explain them that if the sum, which we thought would be appropriate (~15 - 20k), is too high, the Pareto principle would allow us to, theoretically, achieve about 80% of the features and quality for about 20% of the cost. Their genuine response is:
"So your estimate was wrong! You can do it for much less!".
I try to explain them that the most money in a project goes into "attention to detail".
The "Communication Dept." person, who is "doing this job since too much time" (sic.), refuses to believe and insists that "details" don't exist on the web.
I tell her: "In any kind of work, the more effort you put into something, the better it tends to get, with diminishing returns".
She insists: "I don't understand this".

So now I'm here, doing the 6th offer, free of charge, for a 5k website, for a company that generates 9kkk revenue each year, trying to define a "Definition of Done" that works out.

FML I guess.

Sorry for the long post.

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

I got a little pissed over the quality of a website. They asked me for my opinion and they had the gall to try and skew that opinion. Not very truthful, and if anything says a great deal about what this company stands for.

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

I dont know what to feel anymore.

Got hired directly without an interview into 'Data-analytics' department in fortune 500 company. This is my first job. Got hired because this company want start a website that cost millions.

Even though I am junior, I can see that this company has no idea about software development at all. No git server, no code review, no quality assurance and no proper workflow. No senior developer to guide us (junior dev) too.

There is one 'senior' consultant that work on automation project here but he just focus on his work and don't help us directly too.

The contract is about 1 year. Still got 11 months to go :/

I had the old "got this great product I've developed, but can't afford a website, could you do it in exchange for a percentage of profits?"
Look, it's your product, I have had no say in its development, or quality or how you market it etc. I do websites and the website will do exactly what you want it to do. I couldn't give a fuck wether you sell one or a million. It's not my risk. Pay me for a site and I'll do it.

A client asked for a tool for his website. So I built it for him and he was satisfied with the thing, cause it did what it should. Nevertheless I was not, because it kind of had a messy backend. I made it working and charged my time. Now I am wondering if I should rebuild the thing to satisfy my code quality for free, or just keep that thing as ugly as it is....

What your opinion on this?

let RANT = $state(true);

Don't even get me started on frontend engineering right now. It's like the wild wild west out here, with no rules or regulations.

I mean seriously, what is going on with frontend engineering these days? It's like we're stuck in some sort of weird limbo state where nothing seems to make sense and everything is a struggle. And to top it all off, the project I've been working on for the past two years has the same damn issues as an existing codebase that I was hoping to leave behind.

For some reason the npm build runs when container starts. Are you kidding me? Every time I have to restart the app, I have to wait for 30+ minutes just for the damn thing to build. And what's worse, it's not even a complex app. It's a simple frontend for a research website. So why the heck does it take so long to build?

I'll tell you why, because some genius thought it would be a good idea to build the entire codebase every time the container starts. And I have no doubt that this same genius probably thought it would be efficient and time-saving. Well let me tell you, it's neither efficient nor time-saving. It's just plain infuriating.

And don't even get me started on the codebase itself. It's like a labyrinth of tangled and convoluted code (multiple versions of React and now rewriting on Nextjs). Trying to make even the simplest changes feels like unraveling a giant knot (every freaking component have it's only style and everything from React is being used - hooks, Redux, whatever else is popular). And heaven forbid you make a mistake, because then you have to wait another 30 minutes for the whole thing to build and see if your change even worked.

And let's not forget about the old codebase that is still being used, because the new one wasn't ready in time. So we're constantly having to switch back and forth between two different codebases, trying to remember which one has which functionality, and hoping that we don't break anything in the process.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against rewrites. In fact, sometimes they are necessary for a project to move forward. But when frontend engineers can't seem to make up their mind and constantly want to rewrite the code, it's a recipe for disaster.

And don't even get me started on the experience level of the frontend engineers who started this project. Most of them only had 2-3 years of experience (at the time of inception some of them has less than 1 year of experience), and yet they managed to convince management to approve this mess. It's like the blind leading the blind.

But hey, who needs experience and expertise when you have shiny new technologies and frameworks to play with, right? Isn't that what matters most in frontend engineering these days? Keeping up with the latest trends and constantly jumping on the "hype train" without any real understanding of how it will impact the project in the long run.

As a backend engineer (so I kinda don't give a flying freak about frontend) with almost two decades of experience and who was doing frontend with jQuery back in 2005 - that's frustrating and all the inconsistency is literally killing people (a couple of clients literally dropped the contract because of frontend quality).

RANT = false;

PS: why I used Svelte runes? Because some freaking genius suggested to port new (unreleased, only beta version) frontend UI to Svelte 5 because of runes.

I don't have anything to say about getting a dev job in some company. But I can give some tips on attracting clients for your freelance work.

* Have a few projects of your own hosted on Github to show off your quality code.

* Contribute to others' open source projects if possible.

* Get yourself a nice website and showcase all your work.

* Ask your current clients to write testimonials on your work and post it in your website.

* Be nice to your clients. Chances are they'll refer you to their friends and family.

That's pretty much all I've done and I get more freelance dev requests than I could take.

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

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

@dfox I saw a few posts lately, about websites that people did. So besides the collabs, I'd like to suggest a new section. "DevReviews" or what ever. The basical idea is, every one, that is signed up gets one "token" devRant ++ suporters maybee an additional free token every months or whatever.
If you wan't your website reviewed, you can post it there and people reviewing it will get such a token for their review.
To ensure a certain quality of the reviews, I'd put a minimum caracter length and a "dispute" function, where the review is taken to a community voting, if the person giving the review should get the token, or if the review should be dismissed. Additional "tokens" for additional/more reviews can be bought through the app, that could help a lot of devs get quality reviews and testing and earn you some $ for the servers.

To be honest I forgot completely about the ducks and was kind of disappointed to see them, don't understand me wrong, its a great addition to the shop (especially to support devrant more when buying them and I will probably do too) and trogus (wow it's pronounced t-rogus) deserves a lot of respect for going through the very hard process of developing it, getting somebody to do a decent quality result etc. but I was hoping for the new site that got hyped up some time ago or some update to the app that fixes design issues on phones that have 2k resolution and no statusbar and more. ("just open a github issue" - I don't have one right now and it didn't get much attention anyway, since I am in the niche of people with those kind of setups, most people it seems have phones that can even barely run the app lol). The login still pops up each time you visit the site (basically just click it away, but it's rather annoying to have it pop up), it's nowhere near to the original app (although the native app is written in some sort of wrapper anyway?) - especially what comes to options, customizing, deactivating things, posting into categories (newest feature), getting notifications etc

There is some community builds that try to recreate a better desktop experience, but sadly fail to do so (sorry to devrantron and others, but what the fuck were you thinking when you rounded only the top right and left corner?) - since they always have something that is just thrown out to "be there" or design fails (which devrant just lacks and looks good across the board), that makes me rather cautious if that program doesn't send my credentials to some african prince. ("just look at the sourcecode", yes I have better things to do, thanks)

I could just create my own build, having to reverse engineer the whole website and app (granted, most of it are just api calls), but I simply lack the time (so I understand why my mentioned problems aren't getting really any attention or can't be implemented that fast, yet still its somewhat bugging)

I have listened to the Q&A and I know you guys are working full time at for example adobe (amazing that you both have time to be putting it towards devrant), so its not as much of a rant, just wanted to get out my disappointment about the event I felt personally. Still nice to have seen you and talk with the community a bit (although the time I feel was picked more towards your US audience rather than EU?).

Node: The most passive aggressive language I've had the displeasure of programming in.

Reference an undefined variable in a module? Prepare to waste your time hunting for it, because the runtime won't tell you about it until you reference a property or method on the quietly undefined module object.

Think you know how promises work? As a hiring manager, I've found that less than 5% of otherwise well-experienced devs are out of the Dunning Kruger danger zone.

Async causes edge cases and extra dev effort that add to the effort required to make a quality product.

Got a bug in one of your modules? Prepare yourself for some downtime because a single misplaced parentheses can take out the entire Node process, killing unrelated pages and even static file hosting.

All this makes for a programming experience that demands much higher cognitive load, creates more categories of bugs, and leads to code bloat/smell much more quickly than other commonly substituted languages.

From a business perspective, the money you save on scaling (assuming your app is more compute efficient under Node) is wasted on salaries and opportunity costs stemming from longer dev time, more QA, and more frequent outages.

IMO, Node is an awesome experiment, a fun language, a great tool for specific use cases, and a terrible fucking choice for an entire website.

Client complains constantly over image quality.
Then continues to upload diagrams as jpg not as png and then is bothered about compression artifacts...
It also doesnt help he works on a retina screen and we had to migrate his tiny thumbnail images from his old website.

Maybe I should buy a microscope... Or maybe send him the imagemagick documentation and he can choose the parameters to his liking?

!rant

So got into a small debate (actually a civil one, surprise surprise) about the final project for a class. Basically the final project involves a team of 3-4 coders making a website for an actual client that either they find or provided by the professor.
The exact point of conflict was that the work is pro bono. The student argued that the work should be paid since after all, real work, real client. My argument is that because the clients don’t exactly choose the designers (or have little to no knowledge of most of their work) there will be high variance in quality and contract work would cause more conflict if done in class.

So just wondering, what do people think about this? Logistical issues aside (earning money for technically school property/ownership and money for learning essentially)

Have you ever loved (or admired) a company because of the quality of their branding but never used (or tend to use) their products?

In my case is JetBrains... beautiful company website, UI of IDEs, etc., but I find them unhandy.
It's strange because I follow them on socials, read news about them, etc., as if I was excited about them, but never actually use them... a platonic love. Am I crazy??

My bank's website is the shittiest fucking site in the world. It literally kills my phone, to the point where my browser takes a full 5 minutes to exit.
The latest bug I mean feature they have rolled out interrupts your login with a fullscreen modal which asks if you want the app or to continue on the site.
Well, the fact that I'm in a browser means I've already made up my mind so why don't you go and fuck yourself? And based on the quality of your website, do you really think I want to voluntarily install software that you've sellotaped together onto my device?
Thought not.
Go and fuck yourself you pieces of shit.

Third day of working on my recruitment task, and I'm starting to get pissed. I'm applying for Junior JS developer (suprised that they even picked me, I had 1 JS project in my resume, rest was Java). The task seemed simple, create website with autocomplete field which gets 10 cities with most polluted air from given country and get cities deacription from Wikipedia. But hell no. First, the air quality API that they told me to use sucks horse dick. Like seriousy, you can get a fucking timeout while fetching data, because as author explained, someone decided to make 2 fucking queries per request, one to count all possible results, and then the second one for actual data. Like, WTF, why would you do that. After I got that shit to work from time to time, it was time to Wikipedia API. And the shitshow starts again. Because it turns out that you can't filter the results based on the category. Which means that if the city has the same name as river or some fucking guy doing sports, I won't get the fucking description, because it will simply return info, that there are more more that 1 result. At this point, I'm so fucking pissed, I am barely keeping it together. I want to work at this company, because the pay is great, there are a lot of opportunities and shot, but god dammit, if I finish this task, I'm getting drunk for 3 days straight.

EDIT: even author of the air quality API says that it is not a good fit for given task...

Best freelancer microservice website you use with quality programmers?
We really are desperate on that.
We request some tasks and on most of the websites we don't even get an answer.
(We tried guru, Fiverr, people per hour and freelancer.com)

What's the best tool to convert vid to HTML5 (Mp4 + WebM + Ogv) and keep good ratio between Size & Quality ?

I have a 1min lenght vid in FullHD. This is a demo reel that loop in fullscreen at the first website launch.

I tried Miro converter, Freemake and can't reduce files under 15Mb without obtain poor vid quality. It's seems too heavy for a website.

Do you have any tips ? A tool to convert vids, an online service to upload the vid and use it instead of using HTML5 video tag.

Thanks

Cereal is one of the most popular breakfast foods worldwide. According to the National Cereal Day website, Americans consume approximately 100 billion bowls of cereal every year. With such a high demand for cereal, manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to make their products stand out. Custom cereal boxes are an excellent way to differentiate your product from competitors. In this article, we will explore the benefits of custom cereal boxes.

Enhanced Brand Recognition

Custom cereal boxes allow your brand to stand out on the shelves. With unique packaging, your product is more likely to catch the attention of potential customers. When a consumer sees a distinctive box design, it becomes easier for them to remember your brand, making it more likely they'll purchase your product in the future. Custom packaging can also reinforce your brand's messaging and values. Whether you want to promote a new product line, a charitable initiative, or just your brand's logo, custom cereal boxes provide an excellent opportunity to showcase your brand in a visually appealing way.

Increased Product Appeal

Custom cereal boxes can make your product more appealing to consumers. Unique designs, vibrant colors, and creative patterns can create an emotional connection with your target audience. Your custom cereal boxes can be used to convey the quality of your product, the nutritional benefits, and the flavor. Consumers will be more likely to pick up your product and try it out if they are attracted to the packaging.

Competitive Advantage

The cereal market is highly competitive, and custom cereal boxes can give your brand an edge over competitors. With unique packaging, your product will stand out among the other cereal boxes on the shelves. Custom cereal boxes can also be used to create a sense of exclusivity, making your product more desirable to consumers. Consumers are more likely to purchase a product that appears to be of higher quality, and custom cereal boxes can help create that perception.

Improved Customer Experience

Custom cereal boxes can improve the customer experience by creating a memorable and enjoyable shopping experience. Unique packaging can create a sense of excitement and anticipation for the consumer. Additionally, custom cereal boxes can provide useful information to the consumer, such as nutritional facts, ingredients, and serving suggestions. Consumers are more likely to have a positive experience with your brand if they feel informed and engaged.

Eco-Friendly Options

Custom cereal boxes can be designed with eco-friendly materials, making them an excellent choice for environmentally conscious consumers. With the rise of eco-friendly products, custom cereal boxes can help your brand appeal to consumers who are looking to make more sustainable choices. Additionally, eco-friendly packaging can reduce waste and promote a positive image for your brand.

In conclusion, custom cereal boxes offer many benefits to cereal manufacturers. From enhanced brand recognition to improved customer experiences, custom packaging can help your brand stand out in a crowded market. Whether you're looking to promote a new product line or create a sense of exclusivity, custom cereal boxes are an excellent tool to help you achieve your marketing goals.
If you are also looking to increase your sales, get custom cereal boxes from OXO Packaging.

Why every time Adsense reject my website
At first, due to not finding the URL, because at the same time I was handling the server

Then, Some errors in the AdSense code.

And now, they are not finding any quality content.