A client called

Client: Hello Mr. Can you come to our office today?

Me: Yes sure

In fews hours I was there

Client: Check this email we are getting every day

It was email from spammers who asking to redesigning their website because it was not responsive

Me: 🧐Thinking ‘valid point !’

Me: So what you need me to do for you then?

Client: We need you to redesign the site

Lol - thanks spammers for bringing in new client

After listening to two of our senior devs play ping pong with a new member of our team for TWO DAYS!
DevA: "Try this.."
Junior: "Didn't work"
DevB: "Try that .."
Junior: "Still not working"

I ask..
Me:"What is the problem?"
Few ums...uhs..awkward seconds of silence

Junior: "App is really slow. Takes several seconds to launch and searching either crashes or takes a really long time."
DevA: "We've isolated the issue with Entity Framework. That application was written back when we used VS2010. Since that application isn't used very often, no one has had to update it since."
DevB: "Weird part is the app takes up over 3 gigs of ram. Its obviously a caching issue. We might have to open up a ticket with Microsoft."
Me: "Or remove EF and use ADO."
DevB: "That would be way too much work. The app is supposed to be fully deprecated and replaced this year."
Me: "Three of you for the past two days seems like a lot of work. If EF is the problem, you remove EF."
DevA: "The solution is way too complicated for that. There are 5 projects and 3 of those have circular dependencies. Its a mess."
DevB: "No fracking kidding...if it were written correctly the first time. There aren't even any fracking tests."
Me:"Pretty sure there are only two tables involved, maybe 3 stored procedures. A simple CRUD app like this should be fairly straight forward."
DevB: "Can't re-write the application, company won't allow it. A redesign of this magnitute could take months. If we can't fix the LINQ query, we'll going to have the DBAs change the structures to make the application faster. I don't see any other way."

Holy frack...he didn't just say that.

Over my lunch hour, I strip down the WPF application to the basics (too much to write about, but the included projects only had one or two files), and created an integration test for refactoring the data access to use ADO. After all the tests and EF removed, the app starts up instantly and searches are also instant. Didn't click through all the UI, but the basics worked.

Sat with Junior, pointed out my changes (the 'why' behind the 'what') ...and he how he could write unit tests around the ViewModel behavior in the UI (and making any changes to the data access as needed).

Today's standup:
Junior: "Employee app is fixed. Had some help removing Entity Framework and how it starts up fast and and searches are instant. Going to write unit tests today to verify the UI behaivor. I'll be able to deploy the application tomorrow."
DevA: "What?! No way! You did all that yesterday?"
Me: "I removed the Entity Framework over my lunch hour. Like I said, its basic CRUD and mostly in stored procedures. All the data points are covered by integration tests, but didn't have time for the unit tests. It's likely I broke some UI behavior, but the unit tests should catch those."
DevB: "I was going to do that today. I knew taking out Entity Framework wouldn't be a big deal."

Holy fracking frack. You fracking lying SOB. Deeeep breath...ahhh...thanks devRant. Flame thrower event diverted.

So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

"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."

Client asks for redesign to look more like XYZ site.

I deliver a redesign to look more like XYZ site.

Client wants the site to look more like his old site. But different. Gives extensive instructions on how to design his website to his liking.

At some point, I think I'll be owing him money for his design/dev services, not the other way around.

What is it with these people?

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

A client asked me to redesign his website the other day. He asked me to use this abomination as a sample:

Finally finished all the current issues and tasks I had set out to accomplish before the holiday began.

Boss comes by - "you're doing some good work, do you have anything you're working on right now?"

"No, I actually just fin-"

"Good, I think now would be a good time for you to redesign our entire intranet."

"Haha. Yes."

A piece of software i use received a major redesign today and this is the outcome...

I REALLY LOVE THE MINIMALISTIC APPROACH YOU HAVE TAKEN HERE!

Just throwing ideas out here but you know...testing your product before launching it to your customers might be an idea, just saying...

Well. My life is over. I got punchy and accidentally deleted a client’s entire site. Backups and all. Wasn’t paying attention to which specific delete feature I was using and POOF. It’s all gone.

The worst part? I was actually just trying to delete a staging site where I was trying out some stuff to try to win a site redesign contract. Now it looks like I’ll be paying THEM for damages and/or building them a new site for FREE.

I’m so done.

About a year ago, I did an e-commerce for a client who wanted to sell electronic goods. It was a custom design, so the team prepared a mock-up and we showed it to the client who absolutely loved it. The specs were that he was going to sell only a few products (like 50 or so) so the website had to showcase the categories and didn't need to put a lot of products on page. Also the design had to be unique as he wanted to be different from his competitors.

A few weeks later, during the dev phase the client checks again the design and starts doubting about it. We redesign it adjusting to his oppinion. A week later he schedules a meeting where he starts complaining that the deadline is late and that the design doesn't accomplish his specs. At that meeting he tells us that he wants to sell thousands of articles since he's doing dropshipping.

We start from scratch and make a third design, which he approves after quite a lot of changes. He also asks for a dropshipping plugin which we install in its free version, when he complains about having to update manually, we answer politely that he has to purchase the paid version.

Fast forward, we deploy the website and the design has a few issues related to responsive development. We fix it quickly and the site starts working.

He also has a physical shop, however, since he's competing with big corporates like Amazon or eBay and he can't offer any difference, neither his phisical address or his on-line shop manages to be profitable.

He decides to close the business but before, he calls my PM saying that the website has "never worked" (There were a couple of people who bought with 0 issues and we tested the site countless times). And that we shouldn't have recommended a custom design because the website never worked. He also implied that we should compensate him because of that.

I've never seen my PM to tell someone to "fuck off" as fast as he did.

Hello, world!

Hey, it's me. It's been awhile. How have you been..? :3

For those of you who don't know/remember, I'm the lead developer of a Desktop and (to-be) Hacking Simulator Game. My project should still exist somewhere on here. I just thought I would hop on, and catch you guys up on my progress. ^~^

So far themes are a thing! You can add custom fonts, wallpapers(or just a desktop color) and set the color/opasity of everything in-game!

I have also implimented a modding API. It's under-documented, but it works very well! You can add apps, commands, or even redesign the entire interface using it. It executes modded functions on specific events, so you could really have it do anything.

As of yesterday, there is also a simulated FileSystem. You can navigate it using in-game terminal commands, and you can create and remove directories.

(in-game screenshots are also a thing, you can even set a timer - ps: this is a 100% mod! As are all apps and commands in the current unreleased version. PM me on Telegram @TheCyaniteproject to get a copy~)

Sums up our current job at work - a rushed redesign of a rushed web app.

Almost 3 years ago I contacted an IT company that was looking for developers. The job listing was vague at best but it was a 10 man company with huge international clients for content migration and improvement.

I had basically no prior development experience but got invited to the interview regardless. I took a test in Java, first time I had seen the language but I finished it with some help from Google. At the time I was still a student so I couldn't work full time either.

Disregarding all that, the team lead advised the CEO to hire me regardless, so he did.

Forward to today.

I still proudly work for this company and have been responsible for a complete redesign of their flagship product. I learned a great deal about software development and developed an amazing relationship with most of the employees. The company has quadrupled in size since and we are moving to a bigger office start of next year.

Sometimes life gives you gold, not lemons.

So my friend, who owns a restaurant, asked me over 6 months ago, if i could redesign his homepage. I told him "sure why not" and since we're friends i didn't want him to pay me any money.

He told me what his thoughts about the design were and i told him that i needed the menu, some decent pictures of the restaurant, the "about us" story and the credentials to the server.

He didn't know the credentials to his server and i told him to ask the person, who made that page to send me the information i needed, but he kept on saying "could you call her because blah blah". Well, i did but she couldn't give me that info without asking the owner. So i met him and told him "hey i told you so, because it's completely normal not give sensible information to unknown people and besides that she told me to tell you that you should give her a call, because she hasn't got your new phone number". Two months later i got an email with the credentials, but still no menu and no pictures.

Four days ago i made a transition page, because i didn't want to publish the page with stock images and without menu, so i wrote him again whether he wanted design #1 or #2. Got a text at ~21:00 saying "design 2, but you need to publish it at 22:00".

I mean wtf?! He assured me he would call some people he knows to get those things. I told him, that it would be free, because of our friendship, but no support from him and he keeps stressing?! He knows i've got a full-time job and my studies going on, so my time is really limited and he keeps fking around like that?! Man it pisses me really off...

Alright, so my company wanted to redesign its old website, so we (the dev team) got tasked with making it happen.

Talking with the people making the marketing decisions for the site (think clients but in-house) :

CLIENT : We don't want any colors, black and white only, it's trendy.

US : Okay, but you actually do need colors for call to actions, to achieve the effect of levels of importance and such.

CLIENT : No colors.

Why would they listen to us, not that we are the experts are anything... Oh and they scrapped pretty much all of our CTA, why would you need those anyways, right?

Sometimes later, while coding the Dealer Locator :

CLIENT : The more important dealers will be shown on the map in black, the ones a little less important in white, and the ones we would rather not send people to will be in blue.

US : In blue? Blue, the only color in a sea of black and white? You do realize that the only thing the user is going to see are the blue ones, achieving the exact opposite of what you want?

CLIENT : We have decided.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Client: So we want you to redesign the frontend for this app

Me: Ok, sounds easy enough, send me the source code and API documentation

Client: yeaaaaaah, here's the thing, we don't have the frontend source code anymore, we originally wrote it in React and then we lost the source code, we only have the bundles now

Me: ok fine, I can handle it, can I have the API doc?

Client: yeaaaaaah, here's the thing, we didn't write API docs, but we have the source code if you want

Me: fml

wooah.... devRant's front page got a whole redesign....

... though it feels sort of main-stream now...

So the CEO tells me our new release needs to be compliant with new guidelines. I say sure, I draft up a few small changes and send them to my PM. He calls an impromptu meeting with the UI team and I explain my changes. They don't like them. They then proceed to draft and redesign a new UI based on these new requirements, I tell them that they are overthinking everything and remind them of the rules of KISS. 45 minutes of me silently waiting and an entire 4x8 whiteboard of designs, I tell them this is an entire redesign and that we will never make our end of the year deadline. PM goes silent for a minute, then responds "yeah I guess your right, let's just implement your original changes"

Almond: Look at these stats - our signup process sucks! We really need to make it better.

Boss: Yeah, maybe at some point. It doesn't affect live running though. Leave it for now.

<1 month later...>

Almond: These stats are getting worse. I really think we should redesign this to do x, y and z and avoid a, b and c.

Boss: Yeah, we probably should do at some point, but there's no rush. You can work on it if you really want to, but only if there's nothing else going on.

<2 months later...>

Boss: I'VE JUST SPOKEN TO TWO POTENTIAL CLIENTS, BUT OUR SIGNUP PROCESS SUCKS SO THEY'RE GOING ELSEWHERE! WE NEED THIS FIXED NOW!! WHERE ARE YOU ON THIS? CAN WE GET IT DONE AND DEPLOYED BY FRIDAY?!?!

Sooo this happened when I got hired to "redesign" a website. I opened up one of the WYSIWYG areas and holy shit there were literally hundreds of break tags.

Received a new client.
"Hi can you help me redesign my website?"

Me: "Sure what's your sites URL?"
(Checking out site before I take clients)

C: "127.0.0.1"

Co-worker - "We need to have this added just like this, you should be able to do that right, it looks easy"

Me - "HA we'd have to redesign the whole architecture to make that work, and you still can't even figure out how to take a screenshot after I've showed you 20 times, so maybe don't tell me how easy something does or doesn't look"

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.

TL;DR: A freehoster got a redesign!

I remember when I made "my own website" in wix and sitey. It sucked working with them for me. I hated having an ad for them fixed at the bottom of my screen. I hated WYSIWYG-editors and wanted to paste my own code, a pro feature.

Sometime later I found bplaced, a free german based (also English language) hoster. And I use it for all my "official" test project. My first ever published self-coded website is still on there.. When I want to show someone what I've been working on (locally) without putting it on my domain, I use their services. They always looked oldish like from 2000 but their redesign puts them at least in 2015 :D

Give 'em a shot if you want.
Sadly, I am not paid to say this. I just really like them.

The only serious, as in customer affecting, bug I never git fixed was an indexing bug that caused an exception requiring manual intervention by one of us.

Despite going at it for many years I never found the root cause before I left the company.

The reason it was so difficult was that it only occurred every second month or less and with different customers.
It was also not triggering directly when the error occurred but a while later once the error had caused accumulated errors until one value got negative.

Also, it was a combination SQL, backend code and frontend js and the time from initial error until an invalid value could be hours, days or even weeks.

And we never ever managed to replicate it our self and found no common pattern between occasions.

We think it was some kind of race condition when updating the db that caused duplicate values or a hole in the index series (db transaction or db index was not an option for various reason that would require a redesign of the central tables and most if the central code).

This then grew into multiple error on consecutive updates until one f them resulted in a negative number that then caused a regex in js to fail.

Big title games

Console to Mobile: redesign the game to make it easy to play

Console to PC: just port the game, keep the console keys but remap them... randomly so it makes no logical sense and is impossible to remember or easy to press when needed (at least to me)

I guess ditching games on PC years ago was the right move but now I have A way overpowered computer... (Gonna take a while to get around to that ML stuff I had planned... Prolly taking a React/Native die first and maybe do some also for interviewing)

Have a client who wants me to redesign his clothing store website which is on WordPress. I don't want to touch it... but I want the money :'(

When you don't use OOP for a casual project, but then shit gets real and you have to redesign the whole thing

Send over the entire directory for a WordPress site we completely overhauled with new plugins, custom theme, redid content with visual composer, etc. I tell him to backup his site and then put everything I give you as fresh. He tells me he can't just wipe out his entire site that's unacceptable. I ask him what's the problem? he rambles on and says a lot of words that don't really mean anything then says security. so I call him out on it, what security issues do you have? well we have users and permissions setup he says. I explain That I copied his users table over when we did the redesign, so it's the exact same stuff. so I say again, why can't we just replace everything? well that's just not acceptable he says. I ask him again, what EXACTLY is your problem with replacing the site since I already addressed your security concern. he couldn't answer me so now we have another conference call tomorrow morning with more people from their team. I'll let you know how it goes.

tldr; clients are idiots, call them out for the dumb shit they say and have no response.

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

So this is less of a rant and more of a "I'm very excited" post

For the past 8 months I have been working on a redesign of a magazines Wordpress website. I could've completed this site but I wanted every detail to be perfect. I was the only developer / designer working on this project

Now after 8 months, WE WILL BE LAUNCHING THE REDESIGN FOR THE FIRST TIME NEXT WEEK!!!!!!! EVERYONE LOVES THE REDESIGN AND THIS IS THE FIRST MAJOR REDESIGN FOR THIS COMPANY EVER SINCE THEY LAUNCHED A WEBSITE 8 YEARS AGO!

So the company I'm interning in just got a project in WordPress from an old client. I'm their "WordPress backend guy" apparently coz I'm apparently the only one who seems to know WordPress. The site has multiple malwares and they want to redesign the thing too. Work starts on Monday and now DevRant algo is showing me a lot of WordPress rants. Guess good times are ahead.

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote:

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

– Jake Archibald, 2013

The new Gmail shows how redesign should not be done. Everywhere white, bright colors, no contrasts. Here rounding is smaller, there bigger, there is shadow, here not. Seriously, what I saw a few months ago at the announcements looked much better than what I see now. It's good that I'm using a desktop client, because I think I'd switch completely to Outlook.

User: This web page form is too hard to use and is prone to have wrong data filled out.

Me: Uh...ok. Here is a redesign. You literally fill out one text field and a date picker.

User: Oh this is great, thanks.

*checks the database and the very first entry they created had the wrong date.*

Fuck me.

I'm working on a redesign of a website and their logo is so bad… (I made it years ago, but ssshhh)…
And they love it so much, so I can't even change it.

It's killing my creativity, because the only way you can put it seems to be at the top, inside a white header.

I hate its' designer so much… and it's me! Fuck myself.
I designed it thinking about a particular website look, so it was perfect back then, but now I have to do something "new", "different", but without changing the logo.

Any suggestion on where to put it, how, or how kill myself?

Okay, I'm interning at a government institution & boy let me just tell you... mmmh... A FUCKING MESS!

So I'm tasked with developing a HR system that the whole company should eventually use. I tell them I'm not familiar with the open source technologies they'd like me to use, they tell me no worries, you can develop a prototype with a tech stack that you're familiar with. Also, they tell me that they don't quite have the requirements from HR so what I can do for my prototype is just develop something "general" that works according to their "idea".

Being the good intern I am, I develop quite a good functioning prototype & present it to the team who then present it to the managers.

Finally we're all called in for a final meeting with the managers & HR, and guess what? The requirements for the system are different. Almost 90% of the features we built into the prototype need to change. Also, the system must use open source technologies. The managers promise to send a detailed requirements specification document, with sample data. I think this is a great idea as there's still a lot I don't understand. I expected this to happen, so I soon start to redesign afresh, this time trying as hard as possible to consider open source technologies within my plans.

But noooo... My team wants me to "finish" the system!

"Finish" what system, I ask? That was a prototype!

"Just tweak the functionality you built to meet the new requirements".

WTF!

We don't even have the actual requirements specification document, so I'll still be coding blindly. Also, the whole system needs to be re-built using open source technology!

Instead of pushing me to develop a system blindly, with no requirements, how about you push HR to tell you exactly what they need and how it should work first!?

I'm honestly exhausted with the false sense of urgency from my team!!

Just received the code for a WP site that needs a redesign... The guy who owns it outsourced the job to some indian folks who filled it with at shitton of plugins, and now it's both ugly as hell and a bitch to work with...
FML.

Manager redesigned large parts of a website template that I have been working on.

now, this did not bother me one bit but I am pretty sure it has to do with the delivery of the message. She was so happy about the redesign and it really did look better. I could not find it in me heart to not comply and just be happy. Plus she always lets me come in super late :V and she really is pretty and very nice to us.

oh well.

I’m developing a fairly sophisticated desktop app in Python with PyQt5 as the widget set. Because my partner insists that all the kids these days love Python.

Piss on Python. And that goes double for PyQt5.

I’m on the absolute hardest section of the app. It’s a fairly complex import of data from PDF reports. There are so many different parts that I decided to go with a wizard.

So, I built a QWizard in Qt Designer. It generates a C++ .ui file, but you just truck it over to the command line and run this pyuic5 command, and it converts to a handy dandy Python class. Woo. You can subclass it and consume it from your Python script.

Sounded SO MUCH EASIER than writing the wizard from scratch. But OH NO. I need to do custom validation on my custom text control at every stage to control when the Next and Finish buttons are enabled, which means I gotta overwrite some damn event.

But I can’t. Because I can’t subclass the individual pages. Because they’re part of the same damn file and the wizard offers no access to them.

I’m almost certain that I’m going to have to completely redesign the wizard so that it’s pages are in separate files, which means I have to recode the bitch as well.

The cherry on top is that there’s zero documentation for this specific thing. None. No QWizard documentation exists for PyQt5 (if there is, they’re doing a damn good job of hiding it), so I have to read the documentation for PyQt4. Not the same animal. Close, but different. Even with the differences aside, this documentation is minimal and useless. “We’re going to tell you in very general terms what you should do, but we’ll give you zero idea how to do it. And we know the very common code method you’ll want to try first won’t work.”

And getting at this stuff when you do it in Qt Designer is WAY different. And all that documentation is in C++. Because apparently you HAVE to speak C++ if you want any real info about PyQt. Because that’s perfectly reasonable, right?

So, now I’ve lowered myself and posted a question on Stack. Because, hey, once you get past the power-tripping, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling, neck-bearded high school punching bags picking apart your question rather than, I dunno..., BEING HELPFUL, sometimes you can get good info there. Sometimes. They seriously saved my ass at least one time.

But yeah. Fuck Python. Fuck everything Qt.

I am making an LDAP user manager and porting application for my workplace.

The thing is, i made the first version of it in PHP already. Shit works fine and it without an issue.

But

I had an itch to redesign it using another tech stack that would be speedier, more tested and using a more established platform.

Enter Clojure, a Lisp dialect for the JVM. In a single day I managed to get 80% of the application done. We have about 80k users inside of our ldap system(maybe more) and I tested it with 150 accounts, so far so good.

If this works I will be the first person to deploy a Clojure application, not only for my organization, but for the city as a whole while simultaneously being able to say that I got a Lisp app deployed and working :D

I am loving this. Really wanna have a Lisp app out there and add it to my resume.

The head of my department, an old timer and really ancient dev smiled heavily when I showed him the codebase. Not only is it minimal, it is concise and elegant :D

I love Clojure

And Texas

do you guys think an alternative to the web would be a cool idea?

like an entire redesign of the protocols, languages, security, etc

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.

Started to redesign my wifes website into grid-layout with SASS. It is fun and I save a lot of markup HTML.
I try to keep the green theme, but I realy suck at design... I just have no eye for colors. I rather would keep everything white and grey...

Mantain a huge bad designed and worse written full stack project.

It was an internship and I was paid pretty well. It still lead me almost to a burnout; while sleeping I used to dream the project

They hired me a couple of months later to redesign it from scratch. I only rebuilt the db and I made a sweet job. 85 reduntant tables reduced to 30.
Then they fired me because they couldn't afford me. Still got paid well enough

"If you find an element of your interface requires instructions, then you need to redesign it." - Dan Rubin

My boss had a 50 page word document where he add any bugs he has found (he likes to test before it goes to QA) we then have to read that document for any changes (hi-lighted in blue) then add them to our bug tracking system. Any updates that are made on the ticket we have to add to the word document.

We tried letting him use our bug tracking tool but he hated using it as the padding on the navigation links was too big. We would have to redesign the 3rd party tool just for him

I was out sick the day an urgent ETL job I was building would be due, so it got reassigned. When I return, I find most of my code commented out and replaced.

The first step was rewritten, with a comment that reads "Made changes to run faster." What used to be a single execution lasting 30 seconds was now a 4 step process taking 5 minutes, and yielding identical results.

Being a one-time execution (not a recurring job), I'm left wondering why they thought execution speed was even an issue, let alone what about their redesign they felt was an improvement...

when you divide the products you sell into different categories, i dont think "human hair" is a good category.

this actually gives me an idea. i kinda wanna create a redesign plan for aliexpress app tbh cause i dont like its UI/UX.

Today is release day...big sprint (complete UI redesign) ... Already 1 and half month late ... fingers crossed (specially for in house clients)

why the fuck do these mother fuckers have to give information to the ones responsible for designing the fucking application on the approval fase so I have to redesign some areas and spend a lot of time doing shit I could do once...
and that's not new information... no... I could handle it... it's fucking things you know since your fucking birth!!! fuck you and your shit talk!!!

So.. What do you guys think of the new github header?

Goals for 2018

Finish all my udemy courses I purchased back in 2016 and never watched

Learn to write tests for all my work

Figure out the shitty api in Drupal 8

Redesign my apps so they look pretty and make me more money.

Learn to Automate my app feeds

Redesign my company website to look more professional

Sell my townhouse

Start running again

Loose weight

Be a better husband and father.

Learn new tech and make something fucking awesome!

Go to tech Meetups

Hang around smart people and learn to be a better coder.

Battle my demons and autism.

i was staging the fucker site to deploy and get on with it, but now the requirements changed, and major redesign is needed
I'm payed by hour but this shit still infuriates me

Agency hires me to convert a 4 column + sidebar + pattern backgrounds email to responsive, for a big client, I make a redesign, simplifying it (less columns, flat...) to avoid issues, client insists, exactly the same design is needed.

I tell him its almost impossible but I will try, and try, and try, many times, but on their old Outlook, some email parts are not aligned (just that), try, and try, many hours, many days beyond budget... all the times since first explaining that perfection is not possible with all possible email clients, and like 7% is using outlook... At that point, and before, email was so well.

Finally I put an end to this, tell them to pay and leave me alone, as they didn't take my advises and warnings serious, not my fault.

This story is nothing until the discovery I made today: the agency had signed a contract with the client, a bank, in that contract there was the obligation to replicate exactly the same design and should be perfect in all email clients...

Google's new Material design, with more curvy elements with broad borders, woth cocky font ...... is UGLY as FUCK

12 year kid at work

Things nobody asked for: Yet another Slack redesign.

FFS keep the design stable, I like to remember where shit is. Stop moving it around every three months.

Last week I received an invitation to lead the development of a e-commerce redesign, replatforming and data migration. I was excited to work on it, and started the analysis and planning, glad to spend time focusing on quality. But Murphy's law is never asleep - this Monday, I was asked to speed things up and reduce a 4 month project to 1 week.

Feature creep is absolutely terrible. Every freaking time I start working on my game I’ll tell myself, “okay, I’m almost done. 90% done, just got to finish up these designs her- wait a minute, does that button look right?” *Proceeds to completely redesign the UI and add 8 more options.* etc, etc.

Point is, I need to stop adding stuff. I need a hard deadline.

Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.

What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).

Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.

So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.

The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).

One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).

The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.

Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.

Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

Going into uni, the first thing I did (like many others) was to join an on campus organization (club/group). I made the choice of joining my unis publication. Little did I know 2 years ago that I had just joined the top most student magazine in this country. (Literally).
Honestly, I was excited. I was the first web developer that qualified that year, and within a year I was able to claim my position as the senior developer. It had been an uphill climb all the way, I was able to redesign the entire website and implement an insane amount of features as well as add both iOS and Android apps to the list of things I had done in a year.

I had loved everything I did, only when I was given my new position as senior dev did I see the reality of being in this magazine.. it's in total chaos. Every year we elect new editorial members (as old ones graduate) however the new ones have no idea how to run the magazine, they have literally declared that were in crisis mode. Being in an art school were all about creativity, and honestly, there is nothing creative about our magazine anymore.

Suddenly after two years I feel that my work no longer matters to them anymore. I have thought about quiting a million times now but they would take away my grant if I did (we get a subsidy for working for the magazine). I have two more years and I feel like absolute shit being in this magazine, my work is never credited and I am never mentioned either! While I am the reason they have a face on the internet, they never once have credited me. I don't feel like I belong in the team anymore. I feel like they only have me there is because they can't find a replacement nearly as good. (I'm sorry but I consider myself the best.)

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

Every year, the worst dev experience comes right at the holidays, when website owners with big egos want to launch right on (U.S.) Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, or New Year’s Eve/Day because they think they’re that popular and important. It never occurs to them that this is the WORST time because any third party support you need for hosting, APIs, plugins, etc. is either backlogged or out of office. And because NOBODY is eagerly awaiting the redesign of ANY website on those particular dates since they are stuffing their faces and getting s&&&faced at bars and parties. Nobody will even notice that your website has changed until January 15th at the earliest.

When you miss a couple of days of work and get back to find out management has decided to do a complete redesign of the redesign you just redesigned! What the flying fuck!

FMDL

Ugh downfalls of building with open source and constantly changing tools is having one perfectly functioning project just stop working... Time to redesign... Again!

My ex boss , keep interrupting the project I was leading.. and half way through . He decided to make a huge db redesign just to disagree with me.
Simply I didn't go to office the next day and never since !

just gotta love changes that involve a major database redesign to properly implement weeks before it's supposed to go live

Our Joomla-based site just got a redesign. The developer who did it did something wrong. Articles no longer are attached to their parent categories and are now all referenced at the root level in URLs.

I pulled up the 404 log and now see that some website or bot or whatever is hitting up each category for each article, which screws with our SEO 404 report in Google Search Console.

Which means I have to find a way to programmatically redirect every article within every category "up" a level to the root where each article is now found.

And I have no way of knowing which article belongs to which category anymore. Even if I did, a test shows that articles attached to categories still want to come up at the root level, not in their categories.

Joomla is G.A.R.B.A.G.E.

Who the FUCK thought "let's completely redesign the Doodle mobile app and make it as unusable as possible!"?

The app RESETS every selected option EVERY time you switch to another app and back. Like yea, you don't need to use the calendar app to check at what dates you're available.

Fucking morons! What. a. shit. piece. of. software. How can any PM approve of this? I bet even ChatGPT could do a better job. Fucking hell. "Let's save money with developing hybrid apps! We have no clue how to do it right but: we spend less money, yay!" Fuck. You.

(First rant. Don't know if I did this right but I had to let this out.)

I already ranted about this particular designer and his need to mess with the client's server configurations.
Last time he thought it would be a good idea to use cloudflare for the 1 visitor per day website. And because he missed adding some important subdomains, the admin and register page didn't work. And oc the client called me in the night and during work because I destroyed her system.
And the worst is that this designer tries to redesign everything for 3 years. Every time he sends me new stuff, something is missing. Then I write him, that xyz is missing and he doesn't respond for months. Then the client calls me, why I still didn't finish the redesign and I have to discuss with her about the designer missed something. Then the designer writes the next time, that he will send me new stuff because the design will change again.
Oh, and I already wrote, that the designer is the client's boyfriend, so he probably sits beside her when I have to defend myself about not being able to finish the redesign.

Dev Confession:
I wrote a bunch of code today that created more problems than it solved. I did not commit it. I used git stash to hide it. It took me hours to write. I didn't do a test on a small section of code beforehand. Literally hours of wasted man hours.

At least I didn't commit this garbage into the repo. The approach was fine, but the architecture made it a non-solution. Now I need to redesign this code or leave as is. It is production code I cannot just "change" on a whim.

I have officially dubbed this week as confession week. This should be a world wide thing. People should fess up to their terrible deeds. Lets start a trend and confess to our misdeeds in code and life. Make the world a better place!

What do you say?

Ever since the launch of my magazines redesign 7 days ago. I have been super productive

What's the longest project you've worked on (in a passage of time type measurement)?. Mine' s a client website, 2 years (so far) in the making. 1 complete redesign, and re-written vast chunks of CSS and code because some of it was shit (2 yrs ago). Now it's super efficient and looking good. Still not finished though. Fortunately they know it's their fault and they have paid up to date, we are at double the original estimate now. I have not moaned at them because they have not moaned at my charges.

Well think it's time a go through an reassess myself a little bit...

Going to cut out premade iced coffee (As much as I do love my dare's) and just do homemade to save money and help with my acne...

Potentially start going for walks and do some minor working out if my back will allow it.

Pick up my violin and continue learning it...

And for the biggest hurdle.... I'm going to drop most of my current projects and take what's left, redesign from the ground up and just hammer them out with my nose to the ground and ass in the air...

Time for hell ( '-') ‾\

Whose fucking idea was it to still consider assembly (with C being optional) as the most relevant language in electrical engineering school?
Also teaching like 74HC and Op-Amp IC's are still the most common thing in todays electronis is really grinding my gears!!! Is it still an argument that your 8 NAND gates are essentially the same price as a low cost Microcontroller?
But one can be modified within second and the other you potentially need to redesign the entire board.

So I was asked to do a card redesign A/B Test
The results came in
Redesign performs 20% worse
PM’s report says “no significant difference, redesign approved”
He just wanted his redesign to be published
smh, why trouble with A/B Test when results are known faster than during elections in North Korea

Keyboard redesign hell yeah

!rant - Also sorry this got rather long.

This is actually a psoitive story. I always used to be someone working on his things alone. It was great, I got shit done, I learned something. No one stressing you. But I was also lonely. The thing is that this behavior not only applied to developing. I was also able to observer that behavior in other parts of my life.

So it was time for a change. And I made a change.

It all began by switching my field of studies. Well, not really the field but some details. I switched from plain old computer science to computer science combined with media design. Here in Germany we have a nice word for it. Mediendesigninformatik.

I wish I had made that change earlier. Nonetheless it's never too late to make a change. So I began going to creative courses, like animation or graphic design. Directly from the start I made sure to talk to people. Make them remember me, offered my help because I already had experience with some things etc.

Next up was to get a job. So I got one. Now I'm working as a Game Master for a branding of escape rooms. Fun job. Also something different from developing all day, which is quite nice to do sometimes.
This job is where my change begun. The people there are amazing. I felt instantly like I've found new friends. Actually I also developed a crush on someone there and we are possibly dating soon. Not quite sure about that yet though. That also isn't the point here.

So a month later I moved out of my parents house. Living together with friends now and it's great. I'm so much more creative, so much more shit happens. I feel like a different human.

So I continued working on myself. I wanted to get really good at it. I wanted my groups to succeed whole having a challenge. They were supposed to leave happily, even when they didn't make it. Of course not everyone can be satisfied, but I noticed a positive change. Which motivated me to redesign and rethink the tool we use to give the players hints, manage their time and other stuff.
I was scared at first, but eventually I showed them what I did. Their feedback was surprisingly positive and while it will perhaps never replace our actual tools because our chef is a cheapskate, I was happy to achieve something. This continued. I made more stuff and formed connections.

Now I'm not working on things alone anymore. Recently I started working together with someone and this also was the first time I've made actual money of it. It's not a lot, but I was able to live half a month of it.

This is the beginning and I hope there will be much more. The moment I started showing other people my work and feeling confident about it made me change. I also learned to appreciate other people's compliments and kind of get an high of them, but I'm not sad when they don't like it. I feel like I've grown as a human and are more mature.

Have you experienced something similar? Can't wait to read your stories.

Even when Amazon goes through a redesign, it's still ugly as fuck.

TODAY IS THE LAUNCH DAY OF THE BIGGEST PROJECT IVE WORKED ON..

A magazine website.
We launch the redesign in three hours.

AND IM HERE SITTING SEARCHING FOR BUGS

I hate to offer some unsolicited critique of something I happily use for free... but I have to say this somewhere to just get it out. That's what this place is for, right?

The new MDN visual design fucking sucks.

It's like a purposeful example I might make for my students - of "what not to do." There were a few things they could have done to improve MDN for sure. Instead, they didn't improve it. They just "changed it." That is always a bad move. Now everything just has less contrast and is floating around with nothing to anchor it. Didn't they show it to anyone and get feedback along the way? "So, we made all the fonts closer to the same size, removed any differentiation in weight so that everything will look the same and just kinda blur out and put people to sleep, and just in general dulled everything out as much as possible - and also here's this logo thing too."

Loving Bitbucket's UI redesign

I've lost sight of the minimum viable product. I've spent months making a product I have to redesign now.

I'm tasked with a light redesign of our public site and it's a fucking shit show. It's using this old-ass grid system with pixel-based widths and it's just totally fucked and whoever put it together had no clue.

...I keep going back and forth between trying to work around it and unfucking it because, while I'd like it to be unfucked, I don't want to spend all week on this and I hope we toss it all out and do a proper full redesign in the next year or two anyway.

There is nothing more beautiful than having to embed legacy shit into an new website because the customer is a cheap arse and doesn't want to budget the whole pissing redesign package of his website.
I hope you choke on the next meal your stinky gullet has to swallow!

About 3 years ago, we had 4 different WordPress sites for various clients.

My colleagues thought it'd be a genius idea to keep them all in one repo. Even more genius, for local development, a single installation which implements a switcher for the wp-config.php files so we can switch between sites. Not bad in theory.

Fast-forward to present day. 1 client left; another site got converted to using Laravel because they always asked us to update their content so no point using a CMS; whereas the remaining 2 sites use differing versions of WordPress on their live sites, no less than 18 months out of date, have no dev sites, different collection of plugins and themes and both modified to the deepest darkest depths of fucking hell that's barely recognisable as WordPress anymore and next to no documentation or comments around the changes.

The functions.php file of one of these themes is over 4000 lines long!!!

We're keen to upgrade our servers to use Ubuntu 16.04 which defaults to PHP7, so all the already deprecated WordPress functions will then fail to work completely as will have been removed.

Both of these clients have agreed that they wish to convert Laravel as well so there's not really much point in going through the clean up process of their WordPress sites. Just copy the database nuke it all and start a fresh with Laravel FFS!

They also wish to completely redesign and discuss what features to keep/add/remove. With no date for these redesign meetings in sight, we won't be converting to Laravel any time soon, nor upgrading our servers in the foreseeable future either!

This is all because of one dev in the office and his history of failing to keep on top of breaking changes!

Fuck you! Seriously, fuck you!!!

If I was your superior, then you'd have been fired long ago!

Fuck Sitecore (Crapcore) up it's ass! Honestly, I thought Wordpress was a pain, but crap, at least I can get it to fucking work! Crapcore is the most finicky, bi-polar, PoS I had ever had the displeasure of using. Full of bugs, issues, and half-cocked stupidity (and we're talking from the ground up).

Imagine this, let's take a perfectly good working wheel (MVC/ASP) and then let's redesign it to be the most dysfunctional crap, that would fall apart the minute a damned light breeze blows on it, oh! And let's make it EVEN WORSE...Let's hide everything behind an eff'n pay wall and gimmicks that never work! Brilliant! Now NO ONE will be able to help anyone (because no one wants to pay up the ass for this shit to begin with)! I mean, it's not enough that the "framework" is such a bloated mess that no one knows what/why things screw up (psst...it's the framework itself), let's make it so idiotic to use as well! F'N BRILLIANT!

Seriously, I can only pray that the same thing that befallen to Blackberry happens to Crapcore so that I could be rid of this shit (or find someplace else that DOESN'T USE THIS SHIT). Word of advice, before taking any job, if they say they're a ".Net firm" ask them if it's MVC/ASP or Crapcore...And if it is, run...Run far the fuck away from that mess! It would save you the aggravation, anguish, and the stress of trying to get any work done with a "framework" that seems to have been made by a mentally disabled 2 year old (no offense to any mentally disabled 2 year olds other than the mentally disabled 2 year old morons at Crapcore).

/RantOver

When the in house designer has no fucking clue about UX and proposes the same shit as the existing pile of shit in the *redesign* -____-

So...we just sent a design proposal for a new feature to our biggest client. Their response? -Hmmm, let s drop this feature for now...OMG have you guys seen the new airbnb design for ios, like it s soooo cooool, we want that, redesign the whole app like this. - Yeah sure, except our app has nothing in common with theirs...Isn't it great when clients make decisions like this based on checking a new app version in the toilet real quick? 😝 Needless to say, we're not redesigning...

Can we PLEASE once and for all redesign email and texting to be whitelist only?

Seriously, blacklisting doesn't work. We still have assholes that just because they know a line of text or a phone number can harass you forever. It IS harassment and needs to stop. We can always have the option of throw away blacklist addresses, but lets make primary email and phone numbers whitelist only as a standard feature. The business of SPAM would be dead overnight.

+1 on nice redesign on our notifs!

It feels like this year, I haven't been motivated to build my own apps. At most I make a few fixes to plugins that broke due to HTML layout changes but I haven't built any full apps...

Just feels like I don't have anymore problems that annoy me so much I want to solve/automate away...

There is one minor one actually but it's just a redesign/extension of an existing app I wrote awhile back...

1) Had to fix severe bugs in a dynamic UI (configuration-driven forms) component.

Recognized undocumented Copy/Paste/Modify/FuckUp driven variations of the same component all over the project. Unsurprisingly, the implementations covered 99% of the antipattern catalog on wiki.c2.com and could compete with brainfuck in regard to human-readable code.

Escalated the issue, proposed a redesign using a new approach, got it approved.

Designed, Implemented, tested and verified the new shared and generic component. Integrated into the main product in the experimental branch. Presented to tech lead/management. Everyone was happy and my solution opened even more possibilities.

Now the WTF moment: the product with the updated dynamic UI solution never has been completely tested by a QA engineer despite my multiple requests and reminders.

It never got merged into baseline.
New initiatives to fix the dynamic UI issues have been made by other developers. Basically looking up my implementation. Removing parts they do not understand and wondering why the data validation does not work. And of course taking the credit.

2) back in 2013, boss wanted me to optimize batch processing performance in the product I developed. Profiling proved that the bottleneck ist not my code, but the "core" I had to use and which I must never ever touch. Reported back to him. He said he does not care and the processing has to get faster. And I must not touch the "core".

(FYI: the "core" was auto-generated from VB6 to VB.Net. Stored in SourceSafe. Unmaintainable, distributed about a bunch of 5000+ LoC files, eye-cancer inducing singlethreaded something, which had naive raw database queries causing the low performance.)

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.

How do you think about unit testing/TDD when writing apps? (I'm working this at 3am so might be a bit messy... Just a thought I woke up to).

Whenever I write an app, I don't write unit tests but as I'm developing I may create test functions for specific parts that I run to validate a specific component is working before moving onto the next.

So first, when I get a problem, break it up into components based on the requirements. It's usually sort of input, processor, output sequence.

Where the processor is essentially the core app. And so I start coding it, referring to the input thru an interface, model objects, adding fields as I go along (assume no matter what the input, I will get these before the logic is called). I may add some more interfaces as well for other data I may need but I know won't be going in the first input.

So I write all the logic, functions needed to get a basic app to run that does what I am writing the app for.

Only then do I write a test functions passing in different parameters to make sure the logic and response is what I want and making fixes as necessary. At that point I basically have the simplest version of the app.
(I guess this is sort of like mocking?)

Then build outwards implementing and testing components as I go along and may do some simple refactoring/redesign. (I guess all these tests are functional then, have to start the whole app).

And finally when I have the basic requirements fully complete I will add the "nice to haves" on top via refactoring of specific logic in specific components. Again testing by running the app maybe with simple inputs.

I guess now I'm thinking how do you write unit tests/TDD if the app keeps changing (via adhoc refactorings) as you are creating it?

Da fuck is doing AWS redesigning the UI to a new style? It is even worse, what the hell is this new crap? They have a lot of unresolved stuff with their services but yeah... Let's do a new UI, as if the ones working with AWS would care about a "cute UI". Don't change the shit that it's working and we already know.

My friend works for a subsidery of an event organization company.. the sole purpose of the subsidery is to develop/maintene and upgrade their products. The just Started redesigning frontend of the website for the 4th time in last 16 months, because their boss changes their mind every 5minutes.

Juat started a redesign of my portfolio & this is first time I've actually been genuinely happy with it. Every other time I just say fuck it and launch with a design I'm not happy with because I wasted so much time trying to make it perfect that I'm not focusing time on client work and losing money.

tldr: stoked on my new portfolio design

As a beginning designer I got a task: redesign of existing app... On the first call with developers I asked some questions for better understanding why the app looks the way it looks... How it works..... And I asked who is this app for...who will use it...who are the users..... And the devs were like.....3 minutes of silence..... And I was like...wtf? They don't even know who will use this stuff.... I immediately understood why the app looks the way it looks.. On almost every my question I obtained an answer like.... The database.... Some Backend programming stuff....and all the time I got some answer from devs like how should I code this or that... I changed every my question at least 5 Times, because I got all the time some absolutely strange answers - which had nothing to do with my questions... I felt like I run my head against a brick wall... Yeah.. Sometimes Its difficult to discuss problems with people, who are closed in their own World + when they show you zero understanding or zero effort to understand you...I felt like the collaboration with those people is some kind of punishment... 😂....but fortunately there are still a good people who shows some effort to understand you or to comunicate... Humanity is not lost. ☺️

"Design is redesign." - Jan Michl

tfw you redesign your website and deployment goes perfectly smoothly! :D

So ... After some good dinner, I might be able to put this redesign together within a day lolz 😄

Third time that I redesign my app UI. I hate myself

So I currently work at my first job and have for 2 years now. First project I had was to redesign a user info set up page. Didn't know any of the languages so kinda had to just wing it. Anyway finally committed my code and tested on dev server. Then code pushed to production and tested there. Then I saw a message from one of the top devs saying nobody could login. I replied saying that I was able to. Well, I actually ended up making it to where no one could log in except me. I learned real quick to never fuck up like that again. Surprised I wasn't fired on the spot.

Fuck, I wanna buy a new laptop and phone. But I know that the next year Dell XPS and iPhone will be totally redesigned.

I finally finished a website of a client where I‘m working on since 2012!!! WTF! I never hat such a client before. Sometimes I haven‘t heard anything from them 4 months then they called me, I changed some pictures a did a little bit of styling and then it took months again to get a feedback! To be honest, now 5 years later they need a redesign of their „new“ website.

"Unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one – least of all the author of the redesign – to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside." - Khoi Vinh

How to find a graphics designer/agency? We're currently looking for a graphics designer for a redesign of one of our pages, sure there's 99designs.com and stuff, but we're looking for either a person or agency to be able to go through multiple itterations and develop a good UX with them.

So the question is, where to find that? Preferably in the DACH region (Germany/Austria/Switzerland) as we're Swiss based ourselfes

Programming at a job to me is no longer creating something fun and valuable; it's more like figuring out why shit doesn't work, con-stant-ly.

It' s like coming in to your desk every morning, dreading the day because there's yesterday's shit to fix. "Hmm, what shall today be like? Oh yes, troubleshooting why my database model doesn't work, redesign it completely and break my mind over db details. The next day? Having to redesign my classes to implement new patterns because apparently the current design isn't good enough." Even if you work on new deliverables, that's just new problems in disguise anyway.

Pleasant? Not really.
lol.

So, we should be done with the redesign project for this site and a while back we got feedback from the client.
Now getting feedback isn't a bad thing, until you get 6 pages of feedback.
6 pages of feedback. It took me several hours to plow through it and check everything.
That was three weeks ago. They now want me to check the entire fucking list again, and then some more.

SERIOUSLY?!

When i started hete i was told that this was one of the easiest clients the company had. Because they see us as the experts. Haha.
Appearently not anymore.

Has it ever happened to you that you take a simple 6 hrs task, build it and then redesign to make it generic by wasting 30 hrs more and spend another 20 hrs documenting it so that others can use that generic feature?

The website we where at for about a year now had about 4 different designs.
Maybe I was a bit slow with it and didn't try to be fast about it.

But it's not my fault I had to redesign the site 3 times

So, the project has just been dropped in the toilet.
I mean, I work at a company with is for learning apprentices and I didn't get additional pay for the site, but still, it's just another unfinished fucking project...

Nothing against the client she was nice and understanding of needs, limits and expectations

But the only thing I've finished so far is something small i did in my free time, rain programmed in JavaScript (with canvas)

So this lockdown gave me time to think and strategize on how to run my software business more efficiently
Launch the model
3 days later remodel the structure
Launch it
3 days later review
Rectify
Redesign draft a new strategy
Review launch it

Why user requirements are ever so uncleare defined that there are a new Button Color or a complete ui redesign a possiblity 😤

Damn! Devrant UI is fucked on android. This app needs a major redesign update

Spent half of the day redesigning proposed feature design. Somehow my Note skills are better than PowerPoint skills of someone with PHD in medicine.

Monday 🥂

Hour 0: "Ugh, this sucks. What was I thinking? Trash it!"

Hour 2: "There we go, much better. Just a few kinks to work out..."

Hour 6: "Alright, that'll do. ...Wait, that's almost identical to what I started with!" 😕

Opera 60, looks pretty fucking good despite it being a clonium.

So much dead code. Things that are not used anymore. Things that are expected to work, but don’t because of website redesign. Does it need to be fixed if no one reports it broken? Just so much dead code.💀

Not exactly a rant, but I'm wondering where to go next with my learning.
I'm a c# dev and I want to get more into massive, scalable, distributed application development.
I sort of want to be with the "cool kids" i.e. open source, node.js, docker, scala, you name it. I get that open source moves quickly, but I get the feeling that every new framework is a fad.
Then again there is the corporate world with shitloads of money who are invested in .net and will very soon want people who can redesign their software so that their management can use all the buzz words.
I'm thinking into get into consulting and claim my slice of pie there by designing their solutions to go on the cloud so they can throw even more money at microsoft.
Anyway, I'm doing a bit of soul searching so feel free to throw in your 2 cents

I cant wrap my head around designing a database system from scratch. Period.

I use ER diagrams to do it. But still i can't figure this piece of shit out.

It usually goes in these steps:

1) i design a very simple minimal system, turns out it works but HELL NO how unsalable it is. Literally its so statically built that i have to redesign the whole infrastructure and models from scratch

2) i redesign from scratch but this time i overengineer it. Overcomplex as fuck. So complex i get lost easily and have to redesign the whole shit all over again this time copying others similar infrastructure with help of chatgpt

3) chatgpt of course fucks everything up even more to the point that my shit can't compile anymore. Fuck this shit

I think i lack the correct way of thinking and approaching this. College has taught me bullshit and confused me even more which is why im so fucking lost. Can someone explain me How to think in the correct mentality when designing an ER database system from scratch.

How do i properly design a scalable database infrastructure as ER diagram for a subscription and chatting models, similar to onlyfans infrastructure?