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Search - "slow pages"
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Watching normal people use a computer is incredibly painful.
* slow typing
* slow mouse movements
* mouse is used for everything
* instead of hitting the back button, they'll load up a website and go through 6 pages again.
* no shortcuts!
Someone lost their tabs today (Windows crashed), so I said "press ctrl + shift + T". They were so amazed that keys could do something so advanced.
Dhcosncowhtoehwurt hrnxkxxhry he.
Honestly, if people learned how to use keyboards to their full potential, they could shave off 1-2 hours of their normal work PER DAY!22 -
So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.
Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.
He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.
What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!
Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'
He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.
Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.
So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.
So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!
Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.
Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.
You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.
Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.8 -
--- GitHub 24-hour outage post mortem ---
As many of you will remember; Github fell over earlier this month and cracked its head on the counter top on the way down. For more or less a full 24 hours the repo-wrangling behemoth had inconsistent data being presented to users, slow response times and failing requests during common user actions such as reporting issues and questioning your career choice in code reviews.
It's been revealed in a post-mortem of the incident (link at the end of the article) that DB replication was the root cause of the chaos after a failing 100G network link was being replaced during routine maintenance. I don't pretend to be a rockstar-ninja-wizard DBA but after speaking with colleagues who went a shade whiter when the term "replication" was used - It's hard to predict where a design decision will bite back and leave you untanging the web of lies and misinformation reported by the databases for weeks if not months after everything's gone a tad sideways.
When the link was yanked out of the east coast DC undergoing maintenance - Github's "Orchestrator" software did exactly what it was meant to do; It hit the "ohshi" button and failed over to another DC that wasn't reporting any issues. The hitch in the master plan was that when connectivity came back up at the east coast DC, Orchestrator was unable to (un)fail-over back to the east coast DC due to each cluster containing data the other didn't have.
At this point it's reasonable to assume that pants were turning funny colours - Monitoring systems across the board started squealing, firing off messages to engineers demanding they rouse from the land of nod and snap back to reality, that was a bit more "on-fire" than usual. A quick call to Orchestrator's API returned a result set that only contained database servers from the west coast - none of the east coast servers had responded.
Come 11pm UTC (about 10 minutes after the initial pant re-colouring) engineers realised they were well and truly backed into a corner, the site was flipped into "Yellow" status and internal mechanisms for deployments were locked out. 5 minutes later an Incident Co-ordinator was dragged from their lair by the status change and almost immediately flipped the site into "Red" status, a move i can only hope was accompanied by all the lights going red and klaxons sounding.
Even more engineers were roused from their slumber to help with the recovery effort, By this point hair was turning grey in real time - The fail-over DB cluster had been processing user data for nearly 40 minutes, every second that passed made the inevitable untangling process exponentially more difficult. Not long after this Github made the call to pause webhooks and Github Pages builds in an attempt to prevent further data loss, causing disruption to those of us using Github as a way of kicking off our deployment processes (myself included, I had to SSH in and run a git pull myself like some kind of savage).
Glossing over several more "And then things were still broken" sections of the post mortem; Clever engineers with their heads screwed on the right way successfully executed what i can only imagine was a large, complex and risky plan to untangle the mess and restore functionality. Github was picked up off the kitchen floor and promptly placed in a comfy chair with a sweet tea to recover. The enormous backlog of webhooks and Pages builds was caught up with and everything was more or less back to normal.
It goes to show that even the best laid plan rarely survives first contact with the enemy, In this case a failing 100G network link somewhere inside an east coast data center.
Link to the post mortem: https://blog.github.com/2018-10-30-...6 -
Time for an actual rant:
During an internship I heard from my PM that my assignment for the week after was going to be working on a specific sql query to add some features and fix some bugs.
When talking with colleagues about that assignment later, they laughed and referred to the query as the "query of doom" (QoD), naive as I was back then, I thought that one of my colleagues had the QoD displayed on his screen because the query he was working on looked rather large (about 20 lines). They all laughed and told me I was in for a treat.
Starting my assignment the week after I was horrified to find out the QoD was huge, and by huge I mean, printing that specific query resulted in 8 A4 pages font size 10, front and back.
There were over a 100 union statements, no proper aliases, no documentation, not a single foreign key in the entire database, naming that makes no sense. And everything written manually by 10 different developers over the past years, who all fell of the face of the earth.
And this was only the query of doom. The entire product was a complete clusterfuck of forms with a queries directly behind action buttons, because we weren't allowed to make classes (yes you read that correctly. We couldn't make classes, unless we had a very compelling reason). Everything was created by over 30 different devs who only managed to stay just long enough to get some work done.
And all of this was the result of a PM who didn't believe in frameworks, ORM's, OOP, classes, ... because that made the software slow. To this day he still manages that product, but I'm glad that I quickly decided to move on.9 -
So you build a beautiful site; you spend good time on UX, refactoring, server optimisation, getting good page load speeds, SQL all optimised - life is good.
Commercial team comes in and slaps clickbait, generic advertising, tracking scrips over the lot.
Page loads go from a second to 30 seconds and even though you made sure all those crappy ad scripts are asynchronous pages still hang most times. PingdomTools lists your page scripts as going from 40 files to over 900... now users are ringing me up giving me grief about how slow this new company website is...5 -
Long ago I worked for a contractor company who took over an asp.net site from another contractor company. The client said that everything ran slow and he had already updated the hardware per the 1st contractor. We checked the db calls and things ran fine; so I said "search the solution for "sleep"", it came back with Thread.Sleep(1) in several places with comments saying it was to allow the AJAX Spinner to show on the pages.
Turns out the client asked for the spinner but the hardware was so fast the 1st contractors added sleep so the client would see the spinner.12 -
A recent project actually taught me how HORRIBLY STUPID it is to store large bodies of text in a SQL Server database. There were millions of records with pages of compressed text each.
More and more text records pile on every single day. Needless to say it was becoming super slow and backups were taking WAY too long.
After refactoring them out as compressed files to disk storage (I love you, micro-services) and dropping them completely from the database, the backup size went from 90gb to 3gb!
It's not every day you get to see a dramatic result like that from a refactor.
Lesson learned, and yes it was quite cool.6 -
i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.
when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"
he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.
i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.
our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.
in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.
after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.
i never received an apology from anybody involved.5 -
I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.
Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness
I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.
The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.
Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.
The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.
well.
1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/
2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/
3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/
Honestly?
I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)
I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.
fucking. hell.undefined fuck off we urgently don't need this yet! unnecessary work unsung heroine i'm starting to feel like dark terra.7 -
One time I had this conversation with my then PM:
PM: …so in total we need like 3 extra pages; the leaders profile, event showcase and lastly a contact page.
Me: Sure, already on it.
PM: Make it simple and quick, I told the client the updates would be live in an hour.
Me: Okay.
*{5 microseconds later}*
PM: Also the page headers need to be different from the other pages.
Me: Yes, you told me that earlier.
PM: Okay, just needed to re-emphasis.
*{sad disturbing minutes later}*
PM: I don’t know if deploying on azure would be better than having the website on AWS. The pages seems slow.
Me: Yep.
PM: Or maybe we separate the asset files from the main site using a CDN.
Me: You right.
PM: The other projects on AWS seems to perform better in terms of SEO. Don’t you think?
Me: I think.
*{this dude literally just lent me a jacket and won’t allow me put it on}*
PM: So after we are done with this update we need to inform the client about the benefits of switching servers to AWS. I believe they will agree or won’t they because the event is close by?
Me: {{pointed both hands at my PC hoping they’ll get the message}}
PM: Oh you done?
Me:4 -
Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.
I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.
Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.
Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.
Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.
Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.
Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.
If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:
if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.
That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!
Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.
The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.
The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!
It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.
But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.
I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.
The whole thing is a fail.8 -
Alright, I've already ranted about this but I feel like that was rather incomplete.. there's some other things that make me want to kill myself every time I enter <!DOCT- WHERE IS THAT FUCKING KNIFE?!!!
First one I've mentioned earlier is its <repetitiveness></repetitiveness>. What was wrong with {brackets}? If only HTML was more like CSS.
But there's some other ones as well.
- Frameworks! Ain't there nothing like a good dozen resources that every single one of your web pages wants to get JS from.
- Quantity over quality. Let's just publish early with tonnes of bugs, move fast and break things, amirite 🤪
- General noobness of apprentice web devs. Now I'm not talking about the real front-end devs here - AlexDeLarge was one of them.. forever holding a special place in my heart - that know how to properly use their tools. But there's a metric shitton of people who think that being able to write <html><body>Hello world!</body></html> makes them a dev.
- The general thought of "it's slow? Slap in more hardware." Now this is a general issue with software development, optimization costs valuable resources while leaving it in a shitty state but released quickly costs pretty much nothing. A friend of mine whose post I'll attach in the image section illustrates this pretty well. You can find it at https://facebook.com/10000171480431....
I'm not sure if this is an exhaustive list, but those are the most important things that irritate me about web development in general.
On a side note, apparently 113 people visited my hiddenbio.html page.. I'm genuinely impressed! I had no idea that so many people on devRant would click through. On Facebook pages this has been an ongoing significant issue of getting people to leave the platform - it's huge but engagement on off-Facebook links is terrible. I guess that I'm dealing with an entirely different community here. And I'm pleasantly surprised actually!11 -
I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.
I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.
We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.
The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.
We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.
It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.
Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.
But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.
I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.
But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.
Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.
They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.
I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this
Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.
I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.
But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.
... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.rant code application bad project management annoying as hell bad code c++ bad client bad design application development16 -
Not about favorite language but about why PHP is not my favorite language.
I recently launched a web shop built on Prestashop. I found that some product pages are so god damn slow, like taking 50 fuckin' seconds to load. So I started investigating and analyzing the problem. Turns out that for some products we have so many different combinations that it results in a cartesian product totalling about 75K of unique combinations.
Prestashop did a real bad job coding the product controller because for every combination they fetch additional data. So that results in 75K queries being executed for just 1 product detail page. Crazy, even more when you know that the query that loads all these combinations, before iterating through them, takes 7 fuckin' seconds to execute on my dev machine which is a very very fast high end machine.
That said I analyzed the query and now I broke the query down into 3 smaller queries that execute in a much faster 400 ms (in total!) fetching the exact same data.
So what does this have to do with PHP? As PHP is also OO why the fuck would you always put stuff in these god damn associative arrays, that in turn contain associative arrays that contain more arrays containing even more arrays of arrays.
Yes I could do the same in C# and other languages as well but I have never ever encountered that in other languages but always seem to find this in PHP. That's why I hate PHP. Not because of the language but all those fucking retarded assholes putting everything in arrays. Nothing OO about that.2 -
I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.
My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.
Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.
So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.
I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.
Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.
AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.
There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.
But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.
This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.
But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.
I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.
I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.
But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.
I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.
On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.
Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.
Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.
So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.
One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.
I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.
There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.
commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).
it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.
it also seems kinda slow for responses,
it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.4 -
Fuck sake, so my bank has been migrating/rolling out new IT system and app/site have been broken for about a week (others noted evidence of devs debugging in production)
Assuming I don't lose my money as some mischievous assholes will inevitably exploit the fuck up, and rob the bank, I will be moving my funds to a different bank...
In mean time I'm trying to prepare for uni, and they're making a ton of semi-random changes in addition to rolling out a site with course details and info along those line, and good fucking god is it bad.
Is is slow as fuck? Check. Does it use never-seen-before naming for standard things? Check! Is the UI pulled from late 90's? YOOU BETCHA! Are the pages bloated with unnecessary content? Fuck yeah! Do I get SQL exceptions when I finally locate my course? Of course I do. Does clicking "back" take me back to the landing page instead of previous page, when I'm several steps deep? .....
I could keep going, but don't feel like ranting and feel more like punching someone in the throat.repeatedly. -
Nothing ticks me off faster than non working websites or apps of big companies.
For example how can it be that the Lufthansa app has no offline support for ticket stuff and loads like all their requests worldwide would be handled by one raspberry pi A...
YOU GOT THE MONEY SO GET THIS SHIT DONE2 -
TL;DR: Fuck Wordpress and their shitty “editor”.
Client told me the Wordpress editor was unusual slow on their site. I inspected the network traffic, while fiddling around in the admin pages. What I found was an even worse nightmare than expected. Somehow the fucktard of an “engineer” decided to implement the spell check module, to parse all other text areas on the page - even the fucking image sources. The result is a browser sending a GET request to fetch the images from the server every time an author triggers a keyup-event. Disabled the spell check and everything was back to budget-ineffective-feces-Wordpress normal.3 -
So 4 months back I agreed to build a website for one of my relatives. In the beginning while discussing about the site they told me that will make the contents and photos that will go to the respective pages. I kept on reminding them about the contents and now four months have passed and I still have no contents and photos. Now they are pressuring me to complete the website soon. Don't they understand that I'm waiting for the f****** contents?! 😠 I kept on reminding them for four f****** months! And they think that I AM the one who is slow! .. FOUR f****** months for one website!8
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I know this is the second rant on a row about this, but I really need to hear someone saying that IBM enterprise software sucks. Nothing works, everything heavy and slow as fuck, documentation doesn't exist, official developer's forum gives me an error on login, many IBM official pages give me a 500 internal error. And, in the end, this costed as hundreds of thousands of euro. Seriously?7
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Ok so I have done some work with crypto currency mining pools and recently a client requested for me to make a splash page that showed data from multiple instances of these pools APIs. I went to find some documentation for this open source api and to my surprise there is none. I thought of querying the public API from the clients side and it worked, however it's so slow that the data shows up roughly 20 seconds after the page loads.
Easy fix right? Make a PHP server get the data every 5 seconds, cache it and serve the data with the page and use a websocket for live updates! Until I found out that there is no practical way in this garbage framework to get the damn API data without making an HTTP request or mutilating the original source code. I'm so done with this garbage framework. It literally loads pages based on a page and action parameter on the index.php. I quit.1 -
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.17 -
Tomorrow i have school starting.
Which inspires me to rant about how school fails. Ill omit the "arguments" - feel free to append arguments for my words in the comments. Lol
Dont get be wrong. I LOVE acquiring knowledge. And this is where my first point starts : PACE. My class is basically an assortiment of dumbfucks who dont understand anything without "learning by heart over the course of several weeks"
Ill give you a concrete example.
Our maths teacher wanted to make us think scientifically. So he invented a new type of numbers "root 6 numbers" that are formed like so:
a + b * sqrt(6)
Now he wants us to find out wether the sum of two root 6 numbers is also a root six number. this is all dandy, BUT CLASSMATES STILL DIDNT GET WHAT ROOT 6 NUMBERS ARE, EVEN AFTER SEVERAL EXPRANATIONS. Worse: they went to the main teacher to blacken the math teacher.
Another example would be the time our class needed to understand functions(x) : 4 weeks. Ik, as a programmer i have some ease, but four weeks is a bit too much.
Because of this slow pace, i am irreversibly bored of and in school.
And this leads to another problem: homework. Since i know most of the stuff (the few things i dont get at school, i research at home) the homework are useless to me and since the others dont get much, the homeworks are often more than abundant {in a negative way}.
So i dont do them - but that makes teachers disregard me. Which im sickened of.
Worse: often i dont get overly good grades (i honestly have no clue why. I know everything and go over most of the stuff with my menthor),which empowers teacher of the argument of "you are not good enuff, so you cant read in class".
It would be JUST FINE if the only problem were teachers - but my peers are horrible too.
I know our brains are growing, but thats no reason for being stupid.
I literally get told that i need to stop wearing shorts because they look horrible.
Yep. Also, most people think they are empowered of teaching me and talking about my defaillance - because they do their homework. Even though they know i know stuff better than them.
Now to one of the worst issues: a group work where we had to de a Radio report. The guy (the one who thinks he is intelligent BECAUSE he has good grades) invited himself and his gf to me, he wanted me to translate 22 pages from german to english (because he was too lazy to write in german), wanted me to do audiorecording, audioediting and writing of a report. When i left the group because i was called "weakest link" he spread the word that i he had done everythinh and that because i left his group had failed (noticed the flow in logic?)
NOW everybody thinks of me as stupid weirdo. And honestly - i think i will stop listening to them. Ive always hated people, i dont need a significant other.
Even though this will come with the secondary effect of me being gossiped at.
But honestly its fine.
You might have noticed my elojquent way of expressing myseld. I did that in order to show that i am, despite my grades, overly proficient in english
Ok. So now comes the conclusion. What should i do? Do you Think that i am like that because im pubescent myself? How can i stop having nightmares of every possible social situotion that could occur?
Does this have to do with me being a dev?
Well. ありがとう for reading.18 -
WARNING - a lot of text.
I am open for questions and discussions :)
I am not an education program specialist and I can't decide what's best for everyone. It is hard process of managing the prigram which is going through a lot of instances.
Computer Science.
Speaking about schools: regular schools does not prepare computer scientists. I have a lot of thoughts abouth whether we need or do NOT need such amount of knowledge in some subjects, but that's completely different story. Back to cs.
The main problem is that IT sphere evolves exceedingly fast (compared to others) and education system adaptation is honestly too slow.
SC studies in schools needs to be reformed almost every year to accept updates and corrections, but education system in most countries does not support that, thats the main problem. In basic course, which is for everyone I'd suggest to tell about brief computer usage, like office, OS basics, etc. But not only MS stuff... Linux is no more that nerdy stuff from 90', it's evolved and ready to use OS for everyone. So basic OS tour, like wtf is MAC, Linux (you can show Ubuntu/Mint, etc - the easy stuff) would be great... Also, show students cloud technologies. Like, you have an option to do *that* in your browser! And, yeah, classy stuff like what's USB and what's MB/GB and other basic stuff.. not digging into it for 6 months, but just brief overview wuth some useful info... Everyone had seen a PC by the time they are studying cs anyway.. and somewhere at the end we can introduce programming, what you can do with it and maybe hello world in whatever language, but no more.. 'cause it's still class for everyone, no need to explain stars there.
For last years, where shit's getting serious, like where you can choose: study cs or not - there we can teach programming. In my country it's 2 years. It's possible to cover OOP principles of +/- modern language (Java or C++ is not bad too, maybe even GO, whatever, that's not me who will decide it. Point that it's not from 70') + VCS + sime real world app like simplified, but still functional bookstore managing app.
That's about schools.
Speaking about universities - logic isbthe same. It needs to be modern and accept corrections and updates every year. And now it depends on what you're studying there. Are you going to have software engineering diploma or business system analyst...
Generally speaking, for developers - we need more real world scenarios and I guess, some technologies and frameworks. Ofc, theory too, but not that stuff from 1980. Come-on, nowadays nobody specifies 1 functional requirement in several pages and, generally, nobody is writing that specification for 2 years. Product becomes obsolete and it's haven't even started yet.
Everything changes, whether it is how we write specification documents, or literally anything else in IT.
Once more, morale: update CS program yearly, goddammit
How to do it - it's the whole another topic.
Thank you for reading.3 -
The whole episode of me managing an outsourced team for about 6 months. I thought because I’ve managed other teams doing non dev things, it would be like that.
I’ve never been so wrong and NEVER AGAIN! I had to own everything and they’re code is so repetitive and confusing. It misses basic structure because I didn’t outline some things like knowing when a operation is complete and that if the same button appears in two pages it should do the same thing! Or that is you break up a SPA you shouldn’t just duplicate the whole files and then confusingly use randomly parts to so random jobs across all layers of the app. Ffs. Never want to work with a team that doesn’t have a plan to maintain the code they write. I felt like a failure but for me to make them successful I would have had to pretty much write the code.
Now I have to explain this embarrassing pile of curry spaghetti to my colleagues who need to do some other work on it. Fuck. I want to throw it out and start over so badly.
I should have told my boss a hard no on that one and let him know outsourcing would slow things down not speed them up. He just needs to stop trying to get software developed and deployed at the same time. Fuckers.3 -
#! usr/bin/rant
Our Entreprise CMS at work (obviously):
- inconsistent UI : check (misplaced buttons, some pages are more developed than others)
- slow: check (average 6 seconds of waiting, with cache)
- loading screen as page transitions covering the whole page, making it impossible to click somewhere else if mistaken, adding +3 seconds to loading : check
- time-based session, inlined in HTML and wildly disconnects you, making you lose all changes : check
- sometimes objects are inaccessible and can't do anything about it : check
- "delete" button next to "edit", delete is bigger and I have already clicked the delete button by accident : check
- can't have local development environment, need to work with integrated editor which has no helping features: check
- first TTFB: adds +2-6 seconds to loading time
TL;DR : a pleasant, developer-friendly, frustration- and rantless CMS to work with, reliable and fast. -
I ended my Medium Subscription today.
Reason:
Non Technical =>
Repetitive posts, often by the same author saying pretty much the same thing.
Multiple copied of the same post being suggested all the time.
Click baity titles which have no real content.
Amazing amount of self promotion rather than any actual value in the article.
Technical=>
Very slow loading of media on the pages, videos don't even load.
Provided solutions in tech based articles often unconventional, super harmful in long term if you have them in your code.
I do agree that they definitely have some good content, but I don't feel it's enough to make me stay given all these issues.
I'd rather just use it on my pc without logging in.5 -
!rant
27 days ago I asked here for advice on how to mentor software engineer student that was terrible at coding.
So, we are in the middle of the mentoring, my approach is for her to get used to normal engineering tools, in this occasion she is learning Git and "kanban" (basically we are using Clubhouse for this one) and Github PR submission and approval (I'm the one who approves them, naturally) by doing.
With git, things are hard because we cannot share a terminal session (via upterm) due to her using Windows on her laptop (WSL is an option for using upterm but her internet is so damn slow doing the configuration takes way too long), otherwise teaching her use git would be smoother than it is currently, with the other tools she is gaining a good grasp of them, it pleases me that the bottleneck is with Git itself.
She is working on a hangman game with Python, nothing fancy just the terminal. I made the stories with the requirements in Clubhouse for her to work on each as a unit removing some "thought process" of reading requirements and implementing solutions (at Uni it seems the professor writes a document of several pages detailing the background of the project and the requirements, I can see how it can become confusing for some students like her).
She will start Uni again this August 10th, there is a chance that our first "session" at this will end by then, my fear is that she forgets how to use the tools she learned, so I need to find a way to encourage her to keep using them somehow.3 -
Looking at vacancies and the JS build tools asked (Babel, Gulp) and then visiting their websites I notice that I don't understand what they are going on about.
"Leverage gulp and the flexibility of JavaScript to automate slow, repetitive workflows and compose them into efficient build pipelines."
What the actual corpo fuck?
The "get started" page expects you already know npm, typescript, and when you look at their pages, well... Where does the circlejerk end and the actual Javascript start?
I've been out of the corporate loop for a few years, seems it's all about build tools these days. I need to get out of this industry pronto.3 -
So they asked if we want a wallboard or not and we answered with a NO. As you already guessed we still got a wall mounted LG TV with a small linux box.
So I started to tinker with the wallboard and created a horrible python -> HTML5/JS stuff which crawls the data worth to show and creates static pages with html5 canvas for graphs.
Later I found atlasboard which is a discontinuated dashboard from Atlassian so started to learn nodejs and rebuilt and added new widgets to show our smoketests, our mssql server metrics from zabbix, our sprint from Jira and some other servers' status.
Then I created the essential metrics again but in Vice C64 emu, I collected and exported the data in python created a PETSCII compatible .prg file and the **** Dasboard 64 **** loaded and created graphs in the emu every minutes.
That was awesome! BASIC V2 is slow as hell but still awesome.3 -
Is there a search engine indexing pages that work without JavaScript?
Why?
- I use the Lynx text-mode browser
Why else? Maybe I'm naïve:
- At least without JavaScript the advert/tracking methods will not slow load times or break the page.
- This may be a nice way to highlight websites that don't have time to join an SEO/analytics arms race.8 -
I'm about to give up on chrome canary on my Mac. Opens up tonnes of empty tabs (sometimes over 30) when I put the OS to sleep and fire it up later. It's slow and sometimes I have to refresh pages for the page to display correctly. Gonna go with Firefox for now.1
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Not sure if it counts but spent the day setting up a pxe boot server for a laptop I have since usb 2 is fucking slow than setting up this file server implementation thing for Git Pages so I could just downloaded an updated mirrorlist without need to add it manually. Just to find out I need to figure out why I have no internet argh!
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HI all.
I'm a novice in Web Development and I've made simple Web App I've just publish on Github. I just wanted to play a little to learn API manipulation and JavaScript's Fetch. So I decided to build an app based on Discogs' API for my personal use.
ShuffleBum is an app, which after providing a username in the dedicated field, retrieves all items of user's collection then randomize one of them before displaying it. That's help me to find my next listening records (I have 400+ vinyls in my collection and I always listenning too many time the same records ^^).
Because of Discogs' API construction, I must perform two fetch to retrieve all the items (Items are stacked at 50 per page). So, for my collection, there is 10 pages with 50 items. So, I used a foreach and a fetch to scan items and store them into an array.
But, this is really slow (800ms for each request), so for 10 pages, that's a lot. But I can't see how to improve those request. I can't do otherwise. Well, I guess.
Hope I will have so recommandation, hints, tricks.
Thank you.13 -
It's these individually tiny annoyances in products and software that together form a huge annoyance.
For example, it's 2022 and Chromium-based web browsers still interrupt an upload when hitting CTRL+S. This is why competition is important. If there was no Firefox, the only major web browsers would, without exception, have this annoyance, since they're all based on Chrmoium.
I remember Chromium for mobile formerly locking scrolling and zooming of the currently viewed page while the next page was loading. Thankfully, this annoyance was removed.
In 2016, the Samsung camera software was updated to show a "camera has been opened via quick launch" pop-up window when both front and rear sensors of the smartphone were covered while the camera was launched by pressing the home button twice, on the camera software Samsung bundled with their custom version of Android 6. What's more, if that pointless pop-up was closed by tapping the background instead of the tiny "OK" button or not responded to within five seconds, the camera software would exit itself. Needless to say, this defeats the purpose of a quick launch. It denies quick-launching while the phone is in the pocket, and the time necessary to get the phone out could cause moments to be missed.
Another bad camera behaviour Samsung introduced with the camera software bundled with their customized Android 6 was that if it was launched again shortly after exiting or switching to stand-by mode, it would also exit itself again within a few seconds. It could be that the camera app was initially designed around Android 5.0 in 2015 and then not properly adapted to Android 6.0, and some process management behaviour of Android 6.0 causes this behaviour. But whatever causes it, it is annoying and results in moments to not be captured.
Another such annoyance is that some home screen software for smartphones only allows access to its settings by holding a blank spot not occupied by a shortcut. However, if all home screen pages are full, one either needs to create a new page if allowed by the app, or temporarily remove a shortcut to be able to access the settings.
More examples are: Forced smartphone restart when replacing the SIM card, the minimum window size being far too large in some smartphones with multi-windowing functionality, accidental triggering of burst shot mode that can't be deactivated in the camera software, only showing the estimated number of remaining photos if less than 300 and thus a late warning, transition animations that are too slow, screenshots only being captured when holding a button combination for a second rather than immediately, the terminal emulator being inaccessible for the first three minutes after the smartphone has booted, and the sound from an online advertisement video causing pain from being much louder than the playing video.
Any of these annoyances might appear minor individually, but together, they form a major burden on everyday use. Therefore, developers should eliminate annoyances, no matter how minor they might seem.
The same also applies for missing features. The individual removal of a feature might not seem like a big of a deal, but removing dozens of small features accumulates to a significant lack of functionality, undermining the sense of being able to get work done with that product or software when that feature is unexpectedly needed. Examples for a products that pruned lots of functionality from its predecessor is the Samsung Galaxy S6, and newer laptops featuring very few USB ports. Web browsers have removed lots of features as well. Some features can be retrofitted with extensions, but they rely on a third-party developer maintaining compatibility. If many minor-seeming features are removed, users will repeatedly hit "sorry, this product/software can not do that anymore" moments.