You know who sucks at developing APIs?

Facebook.

I mean, how are so high paid guys with so great ideas manage to come up with apis THAT shitty?

Let's have a look. They took MVC and invented flux. It was so complicated that there were so many overhyped articles that stated "Flux is just X", "Flux is just Y", and exactly when Redux comes to the stage, flux is forgotten. Nobody uses it anymore.

They took declarative cursors and created Relay, but again, Apollo GraphQL comes and relay just goes away. When i tried just to get started with relay, it seemed so complicated that i just closed the tab. I mean, i get the idea, it's simple yet brilliant, but the api...

Immutable.js. Shitload of fuck. Explain WHY should i mess with shit like getIn(path: Iterable<string | number>): any and class List<T> { push(value: T): this }? Clojurescript offers Om, the React wrapper that works about three times faster! How is it even possible? Clojure's immutable data structures! They're even opensourced as standalone library, Mori js, and api is great! Just use it! Why reinvent the wheel?

It seems like when i just need to develop a simple react app, i should configure webpack (huge fuckload of work by itself) to get hot reload, modern es and jsx to work, then add redux, redux-saga, redux-thunk, react-redux and immutable.js, and if i just want my simple component to communicate with state, i need to define a component, a container, fucking mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps, and that's all just for "hello world" to pop out. And make sure you didn't forget to type that this.handler = this.handler.bind(this) for every handler function. Or use ev closure fucked up hack that requires just a bit more webpack tweaks. We haven't even started to communicate to the server! Fuck!

I bet there is savage ass overengineer sitting there at facebook, and he of course knows everything about how good api should look, and he also has huge ass ego and he just allowed to ban everything that he doesn't like. And he just bans everything with good simple api because it "isn't flexible enough".

"React is heavier than preact because we offer isomorphic multiple rendering targets", oh, how hard want i to slap your face, you fuckface. You know what i offered your mom and she agreed?

They even created create-react-app, but state management is still up to you. And react-boierplate is just too complicated.

When i need web app, i type "lein new re-frame", then "lein dev", and boom, live reload server started. No config. Every action is just (dispatch) away, works from any component. State subscription? (subscribe). Isolated side-effects? (reg-fx). Organize files as you want. File size? Around 30k, maybe 60 if you use some clojure libs.

If you don't care about massive market support, just use hyperapp. It's way simpler.

Dear developers, PLEASE, don't forget about api. Take it serious, it's very important. You may even design api first, and only then implement the actual logic. That's even better.

And facebook, sincerelly,

Fuck you.

Ever wanted cheat codes to devRant? Well, that's weird. But here you go, I guess.

Since the avatars do not use any external assets (Such as images), all avatars are generated. To be friendly to people who want to make third-party devRant clients (such as devRantron), avatars are generated server-side, so that the assets don't need to be distributed, and third-party programmers don't need to work out rendering avatars.

But this allows you to cheat a little.

The devRant avatars API works like this: you request a really long URL from the API, specifying the IDs of each cosmetic item the user has active, and it returns a PNG file. But you don't need an auth token to generate an avatar (which makes sense), so the avatar API is essentially a sandbox you can play around with if you have the time and patience.

You can write a really good avatar previewer with this knowledge, and see your avatar with a white tiger, even if you don't have the ++s

Miss those days when web development used to be easy...

Now the react, react-router, redux, server-side-rendering, redux-form and nodejs...making me crazy.

And oh how can you forget the fucking webpack.

Someone please kill me.

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

Ah finally, the moment when being a web developer is full of joy.

☑️ Server-side rendering
☑️ Inline critical css
☑️ Add progressive image loading
☑️ Minify everything
☑️ Automate release process in CI
☑️ Lint everything

Now that the strucutre is up, time to code the actual website. This is gonna be good!

The more depressed you get over the current state of software is how you know you made it.When you start making your own opinions and say"wow these people are full of shit"

Primary example, the web development overblown bullshit. Fuck me dude, you really don't need that full featured react, vue, angular framework to make sense of shit. You are going over the top for fucking ajax functionality and state management that you could do by yourself without needing to learn a full framework, by the time you finish learning react you probably would have been better served with standard vanilla af JS and server side rendering.

Our world is full of fads and many talented people that perpetrate them. Its fine, it is a the nature of the beast. But a lot...A LOT of software is very POORLY written. And adding levels of abstraction over a very broken paradigm (web in this case) does and will not make it better.

Basically I am fucking hating being a web developer and want to go back to a time in which we cared about how much memory consumption our applications made as well as not worrying about the fucking frontend having the ability to implement machine learning.

I want to run sublime.exe and being sure that it is a native application to my system and not using a fucking contained web browser to implement my fucking text editor. With 20mb of ram at most instead of 500mb WTF.

I knew I made it when I could read comments on Hacker news and reddit and say "this idiot is full of shit", I knew I made it when I would sigh heavily at the idea of having another project rather than having a fan girl attitude towards it.

I knew I made it when people writing about software development meant shit to me rather than the wonder of what the fuck they were talking about.

I knew I made it when getting laid was more important to me than fucking around with code.

pussy > code
Fuck you.

Help.

I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.

I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?

I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).

I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.

So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).

And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.

> IHateForALiving: I have added markdown on the client! Now the sys admin can use markdown and it's going to be rendered as HTML
> Team leader: ok, I've seen you also included some pics of the tests you made. It's nice, there's no XSS vulnerabilities, now I want you to make sure you didn't introduce any SQL injection too. Post the results of the tests in the tickets, for everybody to see.

I've been trying to extract from him for 15 minutes how sending a text through a markdown renderer on the client is supposed to create a SQL injection on the server, I've been trying to extract from him how showing all of this to the world would improve our reputation.
I miserably failed, I don't know how the fuck am I supposed to test this thing and if I a colleague wasted time to make sure some client-side rendering didn't create a SQL injection I'd make sure to point and laugh at them every time they open their mouth.

(New account because my main account is not anonymous)
Let's rant!

I'm 3 exams away from my CS degree, I've chosen to do some internship instead of another exam, thinking was a great idea.

Now I'm in this company, where I've never met anyone because of pandemic. A little overview:
- No git, we exchange files on whatsapp (spicy versioning)
- Ideas are foggy, so they ask for change even if I met their requirements, because from a day to another they change
- My thesis supervisor is not in the IT field, he understands nothing

The first (and only) task they gave me, was a web page to make request to their server, fetch data etc.
Two months passed trying to met their requests, there were a lot of dynamic content changin on the page, so I asked if I could use some rendering framework to make the code less shitty, no answers.
I continued doing shitty code in plain JS.

Another intern guy graduated, I've to mantain his code. This guy once asked me "Why have you created 8 js modules to accomplish the web page job?", I just answered saying that was my way of work, since we're on the same level in the company I didn't felt to explain things like usability, maintainability etc. it's like I've a bit of imposter syndrome, so I've never 100% sure that my knowledge is correct.
Now we came at the point where I've got his code to mantain, and guess what:
900 lines of JS module that does everything from rendering to fetching data..

I do my tasks on his code, then a bug arises so the "managers" ask him what's happened (why don't you ask to me that I'm mantaing is code!?!?), he fixes the bug nonetheless he finished his intership. So we had two copies of the same work, one with my job done and still with his bug, and another one without my work and without the bug.
I ask how to merge, and they send me the lines changed (the numeration was changed on my file ofc, remember: no git...)

Now we arrive today, after a month that they haven't assigned any task to me and they say:
"Ok, now let's re-do everything with this spicy fancy stunning frontend framework".
A very "indie" Framework that now I've to study to "translate" my work. A thing that could be avoided when I've asked for a framework, 2/3 MONTHS AGO.

Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447

pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.

when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)

one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.

i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"

jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"

seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???

it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.

JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.

Just wrote my own webpack plugin for VueJS.

In serverless application there isn't a good way to pre render a single page web application as there is no server to do this task.

What we can do is use serverside rendering with webpack to locally (or in CI) generate the static HTML markup and include them in a template file like EJS.

In that way, the client browsers would not have to wait for the initial render and the search engines will also be happy.

This feels good! Time to upload it as a npm package 😇

3 hours debugging on React server rendering....

The problem is I use class=“app” instead of id=“app”

Hahahahaha 🙄

Everything is fun and games until you try to understand and do server-side rendering.

yeah we use isomorphic async hydrated SSR pseudo-rendering with edge-server chunked ES module CSS-in-JS-in-CSS ESNext TypeScript interop through GraphQL in react-native-web transpilation to react-dom in NextJS isomorphic rendering context React hooks

For my peeps in the RoR arena, did y'all ever felt the need to change from ERB as yout server side rendering engine of choice?

I find it hard to use anything else, i would normally stick to it unless I was using Rails as an API and leave the frontend to React or Vue.

Asking about y'alls opinion because I knew about HAML from a while back. But never really used it and I find Rails with ERB to be really efficient.

Ruby pagebuilding with ERB is really flipping comfortable man.ERB has been my favorite for years.

Currently migrating a project to use Svelte and wanted to see what some of y'all think about Haml or erb. Just for the sake of curiosity. Don't know how many rails users we have in here.

Why the fuck nobody talks about Multi-page apps?! We went from a Web where everything was Multi-page server-rendered, and now everything for Web developers is "Single-page apps".

What about websites who can't do that? Not everything can be a single-page app. Only my uncle's restaurant website, or something which is TRULY a full app. No half choices.
If your website is a multi-page app/portal which actually PRELOADS data, instead of doing 100 fetch to an API within a page that is full of loading bars, well, your life is a pain.
When you want a first contentful paint which isn't a white page, well, your life is a pain.
What are React, Vue, Ember, Angular (let's exclude Svelte and Marko) going to do about Multi-page apps and SSR?

React-router sucks to me. It's performance is weak and it's useful only when you have an SPA with multiple sections which can be treated as pages (e.g. A single SPA divided in tabs).
Server-side rendering is the worst pain ever made by humanity, in React (and prob Vue, I didn't try but I can bet). And even when made easier from libs like Svelte and Marko, I (personally) can't get it to be faster enough compared to a traditional website without a JS framework and with a templating engine.
Anyways, if there's anything that I learnt from React, is to stay away from Next.js. Perfect, beautiful, mess.

All JS frameworks just seem to bloat the code and make it worse and slower, even though they're REALLY helpful.

Why? Why everyone loves them if their downsides are so clear? Why 3 projects out of 3 I made (1 React SSR, 1 Vue, 1 Marko SSR) are and will stay painfully slow and bloated, full of shit, even if in 2020 we should have evolved with the famous three shaking, with the famous lazy loading, etc.?

I am just frustrated.
And let's not even talk about Webpack, Rollup, Lasso, those module bundlers shit which are harder to configure and understand than finding a needle in a haystack.
Lasso was the easiest to configure but I anyways can't understand it. Webpack seems it was made to handle SPAs, as any tool in this freaking world, and not even considering an easy way to integrate multiple bundles for multiple pages (I know it's pretty easy, but with component sharing between pages and big unique bundles Next.js handles it soooo bad it feels like hell).

Am I the only one?

Sorry for the long rant. I just needed to rant right now.

Can anybody explain server-side rendering to me like I'm five? :/

I work with server side React rendering and I wanted to do an async job.

I tried to do it since more than 3 hours.

😕🔫

...

...

...

FUCK YOU REACT! GO IN HELL YOU FUCKING SYNCHRONYOUSHIT. FUCK IT!

😡😤

There is no joy in life

So I finally managed to set up networking on my 3D printer's raspberry pi: now it can connect to my phone's hotspot or to my uni's wifi network, depending on which is available.

Then I set up OpenVPN, using a remote server as a middleman so I can connect to the printer remotely and start/stop/monitor prints from anywhere.

Everything works great, except for one thing: whenever the Pi connects to the uni's network first, OpenVPN fails to start and connect to my server, rendering the printer unavailable (unless I use an ethernet cable, but that's not a viable operation since I need to lift the printer, and it's heavy).
The only for it to work as intended is to either:
a) keep my hotspot active (which kinda defeats the point), or
b) let it connect to my hotspot first (so that OpenVPN can start properly) and then turn off the hotspot, allowing the printer to reconnect to the uni's wifi and reconnect to my vpn.

Why won't things just work the way they're supposed to? 😭

If ever a jinn grants me a wish I would ask him to build me a webpage. If he does I'll report back to you guys wether he went for material design or not, the JavaScript framework, the backend language, client or server side rendering etc.
Waiting for a jinn...

for me, the most interesting project I''ve worked on was 4 years ago for a beer company.
it was a facebook app developed in HTML (not html5), jQuery & jQuery hi, php, imagick, ffmpeg, & YouTube library.
for the Euro Cup, users had elements to drag and drop on a stage, add frames, dialog boxes, and create a 15 second animated story board. all positions of these elements along with the frames where sent server side to create images of each frame (rendering fronts and positioning), then combining them using ffmpeg to generate a video.
these videos were later uploaded on the client's YouTube channel.

this project was awesome, knowing css3 and html5 were prohibited to use due to cross browser compatibility. it was ban exercise on all levels :)

Say what you will but React JS development is utterly exhausting. Every React project is a totally new stack and there is no consensus in the ecosystem.That is how I feel after having worked on 5 big SPA React JS projects over the course of 5 years.

The structure of these projects was all but similar: most used HOC's, some render props, functions-as-a-child, hooks or rather component lifecycles, some used container-components, some Redux, others sprinkled business logic & state all over, and yet others use a mix of server-side rendering and "hydration"...

I dangerouslySetInnerHTML on LazyExoticComponents, and dared not useEffect on the DO_NOT_TOUCH_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED root property. Hooks embrace functions, but without sacrificing the practical spirit of React, you see.

I didn't make this up. It's verbatim from the code and the docs.
This is not web development, this is at best a tedious fantasy multiplayer game or at worst, a costly joke.

Migrate a site to a new web CMS... by rendering all current pages as static html files and copying it to a new server.

(true story)

Life is to take decisions. Which u prefer
Google vs Shodan vs 🦆 🦆 go
Angular vs vue vs react vs other
Gnome vs unity vs KDE
Atom vs vscode vs sublime or other
iOS vs android vs other
Natives bs ionic vs react native vs xamarin vs flutter
Gmail iCloud or outlook or proton mail
Camel, pascal ,snake case
C# or Java or python
Sql or not sql
Debian , fedora ,linux mint or kali
Server side rendering or client side
Aws vs gcloud vs Azure vs ibm cloud
Firefox vs chrome vs safari
Free without privacy or ads or paid without ads or privacy
Nintendo vs pc vs ps4 or xbox
WhatsApp or telegram or other
Sleep at night or not

Coment your favorite

My old budget gaming build (turned server) is screaming in agony right now.

Well, it's more like the AIO Water cooler is running on max and it constantly makes a clicky sound.

But still. Torturing servers by submitting a rendering job is fun.

...

Wait what am I doing

Almost stuck with manual state management for JS. Dealing server side rendering manually. [almost crazy]

It seems to me that browsers lagging behind is the reason we've seen the JS framework boom both in recent years and ongoing, evident in what they regard as major updates. Most of the functionalities implemented in my time working on the front end are high level problems ubiquitous enough to have been solved at the browser level. Same goes for all the optimizations CSR frameworks are struggling to attain. Every CSR app genuinely feels like recreating a browser, both in UX and dev requirements. These problems exist because current browsers are analog software still accustomed to loading all content at once, no in-app state, just scroll states

The React-Vue-Angular wars of today are a direct hat-tip to the Netscape-Microsoft wars of the early years. If they can form a coalition that sets a standard for syntax, best rendering engine, natural way for user facing devs to control app state, fetch data or connect the back end, somehow render this on the server or find a workaround SEO issues on CSRs, etc, given the shared agreement on expectations for modern web software, it'll be fascinating to see such a possibility

Is client side rendering really that bad? Do you prefer sites without any JavaScript or are you ok with it?

To me it's very convenient to have JS in very dynamic pages. For things like documentation I think server side rendered pages are good enough. I mean it's 2017, right? Do we really need to care for those who deactivate JS? I mean I really like it to separate the front end backend.

What do you think?

I'm trying to learn React Server side rendering with PWA. Can anyone help me?

Google is like the parent or teacher who is never happy with your work. I've never seen something so unattainable in a world where non-technical clients rely on CMSes, theme templating, server-side page rendering, and external scripting as Google's mobile PageSpeed recommendations. Especially under the Lighthouse audit in Chrome Inspector. Unless I go back to pre-2001 web development methods, and never have external scripting, and make every page have its own CSS file with only critical path CSS for each page, I will never get all the high scores I'm expected to have to rank well for mobile. When and how will Google get called out on this B.S.?

!rant

I have raspberry pi 3 lying around; at the same time, I want to make a minecraft server to play on with 4-6 friends. Is the pi3 capable of running a server? I tried running it once but it was so slow you could outrun the world rendering with as few as 2 players. Would trying to run it multithreadedly help?

Or should I just resign to a server rental site? it'd preferably be a vps since I really don't like these 'management' sites gaming providers often make - any recommendations that are as cheap as possible)

What is today's standard of server-side rendered pages, today's replacement of php since everyone seems to hate it? Is it Vue/react/angular SSR? Or is it some other technology I haven't heard of?

is it bad to put your jsx in useState for react?

const = handleClick = (sort) => {
if(sort.props.id == 'default'){
setSort(<ArrowUpward id='up'/>)
}
else if(sort.props.id == 'up'){
setSort(<ArrowDownward id='down'/>)
}
else if(sort.props.id == 'down'){
setSort(<LineAxis id='default'/>)
}
}

the other alternative is using template logic which i think looks uglier, someone told me i did server side rendering in the browser

Trying to get a multi container setup using nginx (also in a docker container) to work with web sockets. There's a chance that the load balancer will also cause issues later. And the front end uses nuxt, which will probably also cause issues once we turn server side rendering on as well.
This is not really something I've studied deeply before.

I'm not having fun.

Rendering a html page which if fully populated with code and markup....fire up dev server, navigate to route and dang.....page is empty and can't see WTF!!! is wrong

Have you guys tried IntersectionObserver with NextJS? How did you initialise it for server side rendering ?

Has anyone noticed that lately Safari renders websites faster?

I have been testing the cache on one of our sites. Been testing with Safari, Chrome, Firefox(Clean no addons) and FirefoxDeveloperEdition. The response time from the server is pretty much identical on all the browsers. But Safari is definitely quicker at rendering it out.

Anyone got a clue why? The only thing i suspect is that safari doesnt have dev tools enabled, so that might be the culprit?