A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

Enough with the toolbars, Mom!

Infinity:

The idea: everybody who sees this rant, takes a screenshot of the last screenshot in the comments... Lits see how many layers of toolbars we can get 😈😈😈😂😂😂😂

Last weekend I witnessed the most infected computer I have ever seen in my life...

I went on a private party. A girl had her laptop plugged to the speakers to play some music. This thing was literally 99% cancer. The first thing I noticed, when I looked at her opened browser, was that nearly half the screen was taken by toolbars. Also any popular website you could visit had additional ads INJECTED into it. The fist 10 YouTube search results: always porn. No idea how that didn't make her suspicious.

Precisely every 10th click (anywhere not only in the browser) would open up a window with either more ads or an aggressively blinking message saying: "A virus has been detected on your machine. Click here to download our antivirus programm. You have 60 seconds left before your firewall breaks!!!".

Also physically this device was on the edge of completely broken. The power supply had to be taped to the socket because it was so loose. Every little jiggle would immediatly shut the system down and Windows had to be completely reinstalled (which of course didn't solved any of the "software issues").

First I wanted to use that laptop to show some friends a new web project of mine but this thing probably would have DDoSed the shit out of my recently finished work or something.

I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry...

Proud of my dad today.

He used to be the type of person who installs any application/software without reading what's being displayed on the screen. And my browsers used to be filled with all those toolbars and random search engines.

But yesterday when he was installing an app on his phone, he came to me asking "why does this app need access to contacts. It shouldn't require them in the first place".

I've succeeded in my mission.

Dad: 1
Shady Dev: 0

I wish all open source desktop applications had the same combination of expert features and polish as Blender.

The state of FOSS applications for creating diagrams, DB management & ERD, drawing SVGs, editing video, slideshow presentations, document processing, etc -- Yeah just all of it seems to be either stuck in some 90's UX paradigm, or it's a basic-as-fuck Electron app with 12 buttons for toddlers.

I know... I know... it's FOSS, can't be entitled.

But there's a part of me that really wants to be.

Fuck it, I'm just going to be entitled.

FUCK YOU LAZY FOSS DEVS, GET YOUR FUCKING SHIT TOGETHER AND MAKE SOME MODERN APPS. THROW YOUR GTK TOOLKIT BULLSHIT IN THE TRASH, GO CHOKE ON YOUR RETARDED WINDOWS-95 THEMED TOOLBARS, AND START MOTHERFUCKING COMPETING. YOU'RE BEING SURPASSED BY VENDOR LOCKED $50/MONTH CLOUD ABOMINATIONS MADE FOR COKE SNORTING DIMWITS. DON'T GIVE ME THAT "BUT PEOPLE WORK ON IT FOR FREE" CRAP, IF BLENDER CAN MAKE A GREAT COMPETING PRODUCT THEN SO CAN YOU.

Ah, completely unjustified and unfair.

But it still feels really, REALLY great to get it off my chest.

Now that I have descended from my soapbox, I'll go drag my useless developer ass over to the nearest FOSS project and see how I can contribute to a slightly less depressing future.

2010: having so many toolbars intalled in the browser you can barely see the actual webpage.
2024: having so many banners and popups in the webpage you can barely see the actual webpage.

This is me trying to code. Year 2012, I was 11. 1024x768 screen, Windows XP, slowest internet connection ever. Android 4.1 was the latest trend, toolbars were also cool apparently.

Semi rant/ opinion
I have been wondering a bit about what my fellow devs think about adblockers

I have been using an adblocker for years.
I am guessing we got a good mix of both people who are pro and against them

I do get the site's owner point of view wanting to get a little bit of cash out of their site buts its the ad publisher that come in and royally screw things up with their garish flashy shit.

I wouldn't really mind 2-3 small static adverts on a page, little ones that don't disrupt the flow of the page or clash with the page colour scheme (i know that one is a bit far fetched but anyone who loaded up a dark page in the comfort of a darkened room only to have a big bright ad turn up in the middle of the page force them to squint ). Sadly publishers don't give a damn, their only concern is to
GRAB YOUR ATTENTION...

FLASHY FLASH FLASH MOFO!

OH AND HERE IS AN AUDIO ENABLED ONE FOR YA, GOOD LUCK MUTING IT YOU POOR SHMUCK , ONE CLICK ON THE DAMN THING WILL TAKE YOU TO THE LAND OF POP-UPS

AH YOU WANNA DOWNLOAD SOMETHING BUDDY ? AH WELL I HOPE YOU LIKE INDIANA JONES' SCENE WITH HOLY GRAIL
CUZ HERE ARE 10 DOWNLOAD BUTTONS, ONE IS THE REAL THING THE REST WILL ARE TOOLBARS

They are the biggest culprit here yet moan the loudest about adblockers.
Sort yourselves out then complain to us about ad blocking

A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

Spending the weekend playing IT admin on my family's home computers

At my IT security job(yeah, it sucks sometimes. I want a dev job but that's another story).

Needed to help some end users use and install a toolbar and get it to download through a proxy so they can edit stupid government online forms, which only supports IE 11. Obviously it didn't work.

Wait a MOTHETFUCKING MINUTE.
It's 2017. What the fuck. Who the fuck uses fucking toolbars anymore.

How fucking retarded and out of touch with reality the government can be, when it forces its users to download a fucking toolbar(with admin priviliges!) and use fucking IE 11 just to access a basic feature of the website.

Another fucking proof that governments are cancer and we need Anarcho-capitalism ASAP.

Useless JS library #0 ready.
Communication among windows in the same window group (iframes and popups with a common root), with dynamically generated objects, so it feels as though you were just calling local async methods.
Useless JS library #1 will be a layout manager, a program that manages panes and tabs, context menus, toolbars and a menubar much like Visual Studio, and let all of that communicate through Useless JS library #0.
Since JS is sloooooow, I try to make everything run the fastest possible, trading startup for runtime resource usage. #0 fulfills this, any message will take exactly 4 stops, although registering a callable method set takes .3 sec.

This is pretty cool. IDK when this was changed, but if you disable all toolbars in Visual Studio, the Send Feedback button won't take up an empty line anymore.

Imagine a text editor having single key shortcuts of letters that do random things to the text document (like delete it, hide it or who knows what) if your focus is on the toolbars, not the textarea and it is impossible to distinguish where you have the focus, until you start writing

well, wait no more!! its called Google Keep! available in stores now!