To download data from Google drive, click on the download icon. But to download data from Google contacts, click on the upload icon! Why? because that's not upload but export, at least in the minds of Google's UI designers if there are any.

UX quiz:
a) trim whitespace characters from credit card or bank account input
b) refuse transaction, show error message: "no spaces are allowed in the card number"

Doing browser detection the wrong way, probably dictated by Google marketing policy: any Chromium browser is supported by Google Docs - unless the user agent string contains the "Vivaldi" keyword.

"Issues" like this made the Vivaldi team remove their brand from their default user agent string long ago, effectively hiding the browser's market share in stats, as it will be counted as Google Chrome adding to Chrome's market share.

Coding faster is more important than code quality? GitHub shows a call to action: "Code 55% faster with GitHub Copilot". WTF?

If you host a forum for dev discussions, make sure that, even in code blocks, every single or double quote will be replaced by quirky typographic quote characters that resemble their ASCII equivalents so closely that cut-and-paste programming will be punished by hours of searching the error in the wrong place.

' "productivity" software':
trying to format a document in Word / Libre Office,
text defaults to some condensed serif font,
any at-sign, "http" or "www" automatically generates a hyperlink in an ink-blue color,
formatting and alignment of lines or paragraphs causes unrelated other elements to change unless you make sure to use tables, tables, and nested tables everywhere like it's Netscape 2003

"There is nothing to dismiss!" - modal error message after clicking "dismiss all notifications" button over an empty notification list.

!dev but devRant has become "not dev" sadly.
Time to say bye to the racist kindergarden it has become!

How many more outdated country clichés can they possible come up with? "Thick Indian accent", "hard-working Nazi Germans" bla bla bla ...

If you're not interested in dev anymore why don't you join the European Parliament or a local pub where you can discuss your "ethnic" bullshit with other right-wing retards dreaming of remigration. Fuck you idiots, seriously!

/me logs off.

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I'm a programmer, but not a magician.

The state of JavaScript in 2024.
More frameworks, more minor syntax shortcuts to make code look more like emojis

?= := ?? .? =~ ;-P

but no native typing

so that devs can go on fighting about "JavaScript vs. TypeScript"

Google doesn't seem to understand. I don't want more personally targeted ads and block what goes against their definition of inappropriate advertising. I want to block some very annoying advertisers like the Chinese TEMU crap shop. So I will have to use an ad-blocker again, I guess.

Show a comment field below a discussion, with rich text and link functionality, to inspire people to craft a detailed answer.

Maybe they will forget to type Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C before hitting send.

So when they do, show a message that "you must be logged in to comment". Use a JS SPA to make sure that there is no way for users to restore their drafted comment. Don't show it after they logged in. When they use their browser's back button, they surely want to exit the application, so make sure to discard any transient data in that case.

Seen on WordPress.org using their infamous Gutenberg block editor.

When both AI and search engine results are getting worse over time, will devs and users finally value knowledge and learning again?

Stakeholders must learn that code quality and a user-friendly frontend are not "nice to have". If they don't fix their priorities accordingly, someone will have to pay their technical debt and that's going to be expensive.

When I search for anything programming-related on Google, I realize how many different meanings a word can have. Adding more words to specify context sometimes even makes it worse and it often makes results more unspecific and unrelated. And when I find something that exactly matches my case, it's an unresolved question from 2017 or 2006.

Dear recruiters, if you prefer telephone calls, why not also learn how to leave a message on a voicebox, display a caller ID, and list your phone number on some legit page on the internet?

Otherwise you'll leave the impression of a desperate outbound call center agent paid not by leads and conversions but just by the quantity of calls made during the day. If I had such a job, I'd also call voiceboxes and busy developers all day and get money for listening to signals tones before hanging up.

Windows, the operating system which is so much more user-friendly than Linux, or so they say, cannot be operated by my family members without constant support helping them to find files they downloaded and want to send in an email for example. So I have to stretch my mind between my family's non-tech end-user perspective and Microsoft's Windows 11 UI, both of which deviate from my developer's perspective, each in its own surprising way.

When somebody says they are going to call me, I always fear this will destroy my flow and focus for the rest of the day.

What's worse than WordPress? WordPress + WooCommerce! What's worse than WordPress + WooCommerce? WordPress + WooCommerce + PayPal! What other more shitty software could we possibly add? Some malicious virus hidden somewhere in the millions of free WordPress plugins most of which are not even full open-source? Who can possibly review and maintain that rummage table of outdated crap code?

Coaches know: it's all about the mindset!
Runtime exception? Mindset!
No video in Teams? Mindeset!
Money got stolen? Mindset!

How hard can it be to sort content stored in a relational database by a custom meta parameter and restrict the results to a certain language using a very popular content management system in 2023?

After wasting several hours trying to get my head around reference documents, 20 years of anecdotal StackExchange + WordPress.org discussion and ACF + Polylang support, and trying to debug my code, I will now either write my own SQL query or put the meta query results in a hashed object to sort it using my own PHP code.

What time is it now? 2003?

ChatGPT, Copilot, React, how to make a link in a frontend website?
To create a link in a frontend website, create a span, a div, or a paragraph that contains the link text. In your JavaScript web app, add an event listener to that element that opens the link on click. If you want to claim you're accessible, add an aria-role to the clickable element. To make debugging harder and only possible for the real arcane experts, let your framework generate generic ids and class name hashes for styling and event handling, like "item_09fcfck" or "elementor_element_foo_bar". Avoid, at all price, to use an a href element!

GitHub needs an offline option. Why can't we manage meta information like pull requests and projects in a decentralized repository style but instead we seem to have to use a real-time UI in the browser that fails when there is no internet eventually.

How do people manage to work with GitHub day to day when there are power outages or when they're on a train crossing areas with no internet connection?

As a developer I never understood the intended benefit of standups. Issues + a scrum/kanban board like trello or GitHub project + a chat for quick questions or to schedule an ad-hoc pair programming session should be enough to make everyone know everything they need to know about the project status at any time.

Obliging developers to talk in a group session to reiterate in a more verbose way what they already wrote down when working on it, will make a lot of people uncomfortable. Talking too much or not complying to the talking rules is an expected side effect besides anxiety and reduced productivity.

If you want a talk show, hire talk masters.

If you want software development, hire software developers.

Don't confuse one with the other!

Coding on a German keyboard suddenly gives you a reason to like those indentation-based languages without curly braces. And what about backticks and single quotes, they're for sure easier to find on an American ASCII keyboard. Fücking ümläüt chäräctersß!
Even worse on a Mac where it's not even printed on the keys what they do when holding shift, alt, or apple/clover/cringle keys.

What's worse than being your family's printer support? Questions about how to use Instagram. 🤢😠😡 Fuck Marc Suckerberg and his shitty antisocial media apps!

MDN best practice recommends not to sniff browser versions but rather detect features. So far, so good. In reality, we don't need to detect features, we need to detect bugs to handle outdated mobile Safari versions. Apple again. 🍎🍏🤢🤮

Pressing Ctrl+C shouldn't overwrite an existing clipboard entry that has just been created by pressing Ctrl+C immediately before.

Who thought it was a good idea to use copy + paste shortcut keys exactly next to each other? Some people's muscle memory does not work with such a fine subtlety.

How much working hours, days or even years must have been wasted by people using productivity software accidentally losing what they were about to paste from their clipboards?

Anticipating the first comments, yes, that's another kind of first-world problems affecting people that spend too much life time doing stupid office work on a (German) (PC) keyboard, but here we are, procrastinating on devRant ant wasting even more time.

Antipating even more comments: why am I using a keyboard to work in a German train on a sunny Sunday instead of relaxing at a lake or a swimming pool instead? Well, at least this train doesn't seem to have a pool. More luxury problems for me.

Why are developers so excited about coding assistants if they still make so many wrong and annoying suggestions? Why would anyone even pay for such a service?

ChatGPT is so much better than Google:
instead of wasting my time by linking to unhelpful / outdated / unrelated StackOverflow resources, it tells me to do the work by myself right away:

> To ensure consistent pseudo-element width across different browsers, including Safari, you can follow these steps: [...]
> (some basic HTML/CSS 101 seemingly quoted from a 2015 textbook)
>
> It's important to note that browser behavior might vary due to different rendering engines or versions. While following best practices helps achieve consistent results, you might still encounter small discrepancies. Cross-browser testing is always recommended to ensure your design looks consistent across different browsers, including Safari.
>
> For any specific issues you encounter in Safari, consider checking for known bugs or quirks that might affect pseudo-elements and their sizing. Online resources, developer forums, and documentation can provide valuable insights into Safari-specific behavior and workarounds.

!dev but how did people do their washing and household chores before work from home?

Billing by hourly rates is like getting paid by lines of code: the worst coders will get the highest scores.

Worst support experience so far: German ISP sent their cheap default router which I opted for, hoping that I didn't need to rent a costly FitzBox. Provider activates the connection, everything fine, but slow and unstable on my Linux laptop only. Try using their website, their support chat etc. as they made it very hard to even open a support ticket. I gather all the information, ping, traceroute, netstat, logfiles, router settings, broadband measurement etc. and finally manage to open a support ticket of my issue adn they say they will send an engineer to my place in about 4 days. I stay at home that day and wait for the whole day, nothing happens!
I get back to them, even get a phone call after waiting about 1h in the waiting queue, only to listen to someone tell me that the appointment had been cancelled as the ticket had already been closed. WTF! They said they measured my connection and could not reproduce any error. Did not even mention my lengthy log files etc. It took my own research and another hint that there is an incompatibility with that specific router and some specific devices so I should really replace their cheap router with a FritzBox device. What they also did not tell, that you dont need to rent their branded FritzBox, there are cheap second hand models from another ISP that you can reconfigure by simply chosing another ISP in a dropdown list that contains every popular German ISP. But why are they popular? You can only choose between the different bad ones, that's why they don't seem to make an effort.

I always procrastinate a lot, but often it's more like taking a creative break so in fact it can make me more productive once I get back to my desk and start "doing actual work" typing code into my keyboard again.

Procrastination becomes unproductive when I have reasons not to do the work, like it's an rude customer, uncooperative team leader, a useless requirement or involves inappropriate or terrible tech stack and legacy code.

Sometimes all of that comes together, but I found even in that situation when procrastinating on devRant and swearing every other minute, I seemed to be above average compared to my team mates who probably felt the same.

Most of us quit the company at some point of that ongoing project.

Currently there are 1273 plugins awaiting review after submission to WordPress plugin server. Nearly as much as the 1345 open "type: bug" issues in WordPress/gutenberg on GitHub. Reminds me of "Suggested edit queue is full" on StackOverflow. Either too many people contribute to open source, or too little seniors willing and able to review, or our workflows don't work well enough. But good to see that there is still stuff going on in communities and not everyone just playing around with AI tools or uploading social media content all the time.

The startup/investor culture has already flooded the industry with loads of useless products by unprofitable companies pushing their garbage onto the market, now the same thing is happening with "AI" based bullshit. What's next?

Oops! Something went wrong! :(
ESLint: 8.57.0
TypeError: require(...).pathToFileURL

Did someone move fast and break things again?

Now that Wix use AI to build website, every frontend developer will be useless. We are doomed!

Meta, Microsoft, Google, and countless startups have been investing and growing, making devs crazy with incredible salaries, incomprehensible hiring processes, and toxic corporate culture. They tried to make masses of end users beta-test their MVP products and services, turning them into subscribers and regular customers. Then they laid off many engineers and now try to run their businesses using immature artificial intelligence instead.

AI, also known as "the one guy that can type real quick" can be very eloquent and replace some junior devs, marketeers and supporters, so it seems, but once someone has a problem that is not already documented unambiguously, then they have a real problem.

It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search.

Just give up and ask an AI bot to imagine some nonexisting bullshit instead.

Don't insist that there must be documents matching your search. Just accept that the age of quality is over and people must accept low-quality content as the new "information" standard.

Welcome to the age of alternative facts

All designers and developers are secretly in love with cookie banners and other kinds of popups, as long as they distract users, obscure content and contain a lot of text that is hard to understand.

We must love to deceive our users and make them click a primary call to action button to make sure that they are fine with bypassing anything that privacy laws have been made for in the first place.

Or where are the best practice examples, code snippets and plugins do find a better way by default? Any commercial website will sooner or later require some kind of cookie banner and that's the whole point of contemporary web design.

GitHub, your Copilot sucks, and so does Dependabot!

Dependabot opened 3 pull requests;
merging the first one caused conflicts in package.json and package-lock.json that must be resolved;
while trying to investigate further, the second pull request got closed as it suddenly seemed obsolete.
Dependabot: "Looks like these dependencies are no longer updatable, so this is no longer needed."

This kind of service generates so much noise and irrelevant alerts, it comes out of nowhere and there is no way to get rid of those bots once they invaded a repository. And they are so useless. A simple `npm outdated && npm upgrade` would have done better in 99% of the cases.

GitHub, your Copilot sucks, and so does Dependabot!

Thunderbird mail client switched to compact mode or a new look, so I suspected that's the announced "update that many users won't like".
Googled how to revert Thunderbird to its old UI and found that people posted that question, but 4 years ago? As yesterday's UI wasn't exactly elegant and beautiful either, I'll just get used to the new one!

"fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository" - if git finds no conflict, it will always find other ways to cause trouble

Wtf has happened to Google webmaster tools / ad(word)s / analytics? There used to be so many valuable insights before the current version, now everything is hidden in the new UI or Google just keep the info to themselves? Does anybody use Google anal/ads anymore?

Cloudflare knows: I can't be human if I can add "Vivaldi" to my user agent string.

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn't provide built-in functionality for exporting user data. The only way to do it is using an import and export user plugin.

But that's fine. Don't waste your time on essential functionality, just keep adding more features and gimmicks to your Gartenzwerg editor.

Always good if you got your priorities right.

Search for How to stop Apple ID Verification pop up. Find relevant and possibly credible result from discussions.apple.com:
How do I stop the constant pop up on my iPad for APPLE ID VERIFICATION, posted in 2016.
Last post from OP: Did you ever find a solution to this problem? This Apple ID Verification request is driving me crazy.
83 Users: Me too.
Apple:
Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Looking at jest errors and loads of GitHub and StackOverflow issues, it's no surprise that people claim they don't like testing.

Maybe they would if we got our tooling right.

import { foo } from 'bar';

Nah, that's an unexpected token, jest does not like this syntax.

Using require, like in jest's getting started tutorial isn't compatible with my existing JS libraries exports.

Adding type: "module" in package.json just makes another error message appear instead.

Fucking developer experience!

Why bother with unit tests at all?

How come PHP is 10 years superior to JS when it comes to code quality, unit tests, and static code analysis?

I don't even care about "ES modules". I don't want to "mock" anything either. All I want to do is import a handful of JavaScript functions into another file.

Overengineered web dev stack sucks!

The best questions always get the fewest answers. The most important topics always get the fewest votes. The sillyest hypes get the most interactions. And people still claim that human beings were intelligent.

After the American mass layoffs, Silicon Valley software is getting worse in a worse way than it used to, maybe also due to AI generated code and content, especially Google product quality keeps dropping continuously. I am afraid I will have to switch to Apple eventually

Facebook doesn't even let users select text without opening dev tools? Either it's broken or broken by design. I think it used to be possible 10 years ago, but maybe I'm just fooling myself about the good old days. What a shit show the internet has become. Sad!

My browser claims it's unsafe to visit a website via HTTP, even if it's only to view and read. But it's fine to open any crapsite as long as it's via HTTPS and not on a malware blocklist?

"Non-technical" users must have some magic skill that goes beyond my understanding. How can anyone work with no-code page builders? I tried Wix, Webflow, Gutenberg, Elementor, Divi, and Semplice. Each one sucks in their way, but they have one thing in common: their UI behaves even more erratically than Microsoft Word.

Is there a "non-technical personal computer user" class where people learn that logic? How did they manage to hide their secret understanding from developers? Or what did I miss?

Most spam attempts sent to my contact form scripts are so cryptic and useless; it looks like there`s just a bot sending garbage to persuade webmasters that they need recaptcha.

Your branch and 'origin/foo/bar' have diverged,
and have 2 and 1 different commits each, respectively.
(use "git pull" to merge the remote branch into yours)

git pull
hint: You have divergent branches and need to specify how to reconcile them.

git merge origin foo/bar
Already up to date.

The "disable JavaScript" browser setting has become so hidden that it's hard to turn it off without resetting all browser settings to their defaults.

JsonLint ParsingException "composer.json does not contain valid JSON" is an incorrect statement. The file contains 99% valid JSON except for 1 incorrect character which is correctly pointed out as an "Invalid string, it appears you have an unescaped backslash at: \-dev".

And why do people in tutorials keep calling it "Jay's on" instead of "Jason" like "Jackson"? I can only imagine what they would call the "King of Pop" musician ... "my cal Jack's Onn"?

Date pickers!

After several decades of web development and even longer time to experiment with electronic UI on other devices, why is there no consistent best practice and everyone tries reinventing the weel to choose their own set of problems and annoyances?

The root cause, obviously, is using Gregorian calendar and localized display and input format in the first place, so there is no way to make a data unambiguous without a graphical calendar. Who even came up with any of those 9/10/11 formats and why?

So we need to use date pickers and make the users spend several minutes clicking, swiping or scrolling to enter their birthday - past at least one decade - and a booking date - in the near future - using the same interface with the same presets.

But users compare different offers, so they will use different sites, so they will have to handle different date pickers on different sites in a short period of time and carry unnecessary mental load.

dependabot must have been created with the best intentions

Why do most German companies always require "German speaking" developers? Do they use localized versions of programming languages like the old Microsoft VBA dialects?

use 'streng';
konst sprache = 'de_DE';
für (lass ä = 1; ä < ü.länge; ä++) {
wenn (ü[ä] === ö) {
konsole.schreib( 'Das ist gut!');

Google maps: how would you rate that place you visited last week?
User gives 5-star rating, clicks submit button.
Google (in an e-mail a few hours later): Your rating isn’t posted: "Unknown place" - What happened
The place you posted about was removed from Google services like Maps and Search.

Okay Google, if you want me to contribute to your free community service, what about making it more consistent and understandable for regular users?

Customers need Instagram feeds on their websites.

Can you even call yourself a frontend dev when you betray your backend mindset by prefering JS over CSS and JSX over HTML + DOM API?

Many memes mock frontend development, showing a beautiful and simply frontside of something in contrast to an exceptionally chaotic backside or inside of a product.

Single page applications by fullstack developers combine both sides, bringing the unpolished industrial aesthetic of backend logic to JavaScript while making sure that also the frontend isn't that shiny at least at second glance.

Vivaldi browser seemed a good idea to escape Google's misfeatures without swapping it for Microsoft extensions (Edge) or Firefox / Gecko idiosyncrasies (size / magnification issues on Ubuntu, slow Android version, clunky UI). But there are some ongoing issues that I never experienced in any other user agent (maybe I will when switching to Chromium), like URL completion (port URLs without a protocol aren't prepended with https but trigger a xdg-open dialog, autocomplete prefers obscure deep links with long paths instead of the base URL, browsers seems to forget login passwords by default, etc.) - so Chromium seems like the obvious choice. But there seem to be no more Chromium builds for Android? Anyone else disappointed by Vivaldi has a preferred solution?

Netflix never "so successful they broke the internet" like Elon. What a genius!

GitHub: "This branch has conflicts that must be resolved" stop bugging me with your @dependabot bullshit!

ux writing vs. horrible unhelpful and misleading error messages

WordPress Pods "introduced new Access Rights checks and comprehensive functionality to assist you in limiting how your content types can be used by other users."

In other words, they have just introduced a breaking change that hides CMS content elements that were expected to be visible publicly to everyone.

Any ideas for experiments with data from WiFi monitors? Using aircrack-ng / airodump. For IoT themed UGR project