The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

Unpopular opinion about Microsoft buying GitHub.

Just putting it out there that when you made your github repos you did so under their privacy policy and terms and will be protected under those in the future, and that both GitHub and Microsoft are corporations with the goals of making money.

Are people seriously mad that their code has gone from one capitalist corporation to another, with no foreseeable change in privacy or data policy? I have respect for those that switched to self hosted long ago since that's going from corporate to private, but if you throw away the UX and community GitHub has developed because a multinational corporation (with so many branches, products and divisions, which happens to have a few products you don't like) will soon own it, are you actually making a rational, guided decision?

Also just throwing it out there that GitLab is also a company. They've also had issues with keeping data intact in the past. They do, however, have free private repos (although I can't ever trust someone who gives me "free" privacy) as well as builtin CI. There are some definite upsides to it, although the UX has a ton of differences. If you're expecting the same dashboard and workflow you've used on GitHub, don't, GitLab has cool features but the bells and whistles aren't the exact same.

If you're switching to GitLab solely because of Microsoft, step back and think, regardless of how popular it might make you to hate Microsoft, is it really worth changing your development ecosystem to go from one corporate entity to another solely because you don't like the company?

I use GitLab and GitBub as well as Bitbucket and selfhosted git on a daily basis. They each have their upsides and downsides; but I think switching from one to the other solely because of Microsoft is not only totally irrational, but really makes light of/disrespects the amazing tools and UX the teams behind each one have carefully developed. Pick your Git hosting based on features and what works out for your use case, not because of which corporate overlord has their name plastered on it.

(Also just throwing it out there that lots of devs love VS Code, and that's Microsoft owned too... They did also build and pioneer a bunch of really cool shit for devs including Typescript so it's not like they're evil or incapable in any sense?)

I go to unlock my car, but the button I usually use is gone. Instead now it unlocks by long-pressing the car handle.

Ok, got it.

Then my ignition isn't there? Oh, it's in the middle of the steering wheel now? Ok.. but it doesn't work? Oh I have to sign in with Google or Facebook, alright...

Wait, where's my odometer? Oh this is "card" view, and I guess I want "compact" view, huh. Is there a dark theme? Guess not.

Why can't I shift? Oh the stick is a hamburger button now, weird. Um, and reverse is in a sub-menu? That's going to get annoying.

Alright just need to look in the mirror to see if.. wtf? You call this "responsive" or something? I can't see out that tiny window.

I'm very disappointed in all this, I wonder if I can roll back. Oh WHERE ARE THE BRAKES OH GOD

UX DESIGNERS

HAVE

FUCKING

KILLED ME

WHY DID WE TRUST THEM AND THEIR GODFORSAKEN UPDATES

I hate everybody who says JavaScript is the best language because of loose typing and its easy to learn, YES OF COURSE IT IS EASY!

ITS FUCKING JAVASCRIPT! IT WAS MEANT TO BE EASY! AND THEN SOME ASSHOLE CAME ALONG, CREATED NODE AND THOUGHT THAT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA!
NOW WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS SHIT EVERYWHERE BECAUSE PEOPLE WHO WROTE CODE FOR UX NOW THINK THEY KNOW WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN ON THE SERVERSIDE!!
GOD FUCKING DAMNIT I HATE THIS ANALTOY OF A LANGUAGE.
YOU THINK JAVASCRIPT IS THE BEST?! DO YOU REALLY??!!! OH YEAH!?!
WELL FUCK YOU AND GO TO HELL, YOU ARE NOT A DEVELOPER IN MY EYES, GO HOME KIDDO, LEARN C OR ASM OR HOW A FUCKING COMPUTER ACTUALLY WORKS!!
AND THEN TELL ME AGAIN JAVASCRIPT IS A WELL DESIGNED AND PROPER LANGUAGE!!
I'M OUT!

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

FLOYD IS HERE 😎

Gather around kids, it's story time.

So my first breakup left me so damaged and I was in darkest phase of my life. I was alone. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went for therapy and spearheaded into success and grew in life soooo fucking much.

31st December 2016, I first joined dR and since the first day this place felt home. Met some of brightest mind and most amazing souls here (sadly many left the place).

I used to shit post and rant a lot. But I loved everyone here. But then I don't quite remember, but I decided to quit this place as community started to grow. Many others left as well.

I came back here in 2019 IIRC and started all over again. Got along well with new members and started having fun.

I used to crib and cry about being underpaid. Lost a kickass Europe job due to pandemic.

I will skip what all happened between me and @Scout but she is a sweetheart, though very rough and brutal with me at times (actually very often), but she is so selfish for me and cares for me that I couldn't resist but listen to her always. A lifelong friend for sure :)

I used to rant about my dumb office colleagues. Definitely not the sharpest minds but good people at heart (which I did not realise).

So in October 2020, I earned a new job and my company retained me with a 100% raise and a promotion making me lead of product innovation and UX.

November end I met a girl in professional context on LinkedIn who was conducting a workshop. Being hungry for learning, meeting new people and kill my lockdown boredom, I singed up.

Now I went for December break and my colleagues sent me a gift hamper when they came to know I got a promotion. I felt bad that I ranted about them so I deleted my account and also wanted a social detox.

Post the workshop, I started conversing casually with the girl I met. She was married. But things hit off. Eventually in February end I confessed that I had feelings for her and in next few days she reciprocated. I told her I was aware of her marital status and it's okay if nothing happens between us. Then she started to open up of how she was with one guy for 17 years and was abused in everyway and wanted to separate but never had the courage and all.

She decided to file for paperwork and then be with me. Things got messy when her family got involved thinking I was causing all of it.

She went back to her partner and I realised I had some emotional and mental issues of a person's past that bothered me. But we were overcoming it. Soon the honeymoon period started phasing out.

Her family started giving me death threats. We went underground even further. More arguments and fights between us.

@Scout kept telling me I was stupid and I disregarded her. I feel like an idiot for not listening to her.

That girl kept gaslighting me, hurting me intentionally, scratching the surface made me realise how broken and damaged she was. She lied to me and created fake persona of herself to make me fall for her. Everything was lie. Literally.

I felt horrible for trusting her. My trauma relapsed and I started having crazy panic attacks leading to self harm and being suicidal. That girl was drugged all the time with psychological medicines and very poor character & personality in general (I don't want to judge anyone but just stating the facts).

Eventually she just disappeared and I was like fuck this. Earlier, after every fight, she used to show fake affection and I used to melt but not this time.

I was like fuck this shit. I have some super amazing friends like @kiki who helped me overcome this. I started going for therapy and realised what all areas I need to improve. My therapist is soooo brilliant, she understands the root cause instantly and also knows how to fix it. And the same day I and both my parents were COVID-19 positive. Last few weeks were dark and haunting.

Further more, the girl comes back after a week and then acts as a 'nice girl'.
Initially fake affection, then drama, followed by making me guilt trip, then threats, and now blaming me.

I kept ignoring her calls (50 to 70 calls in a day), emails, left her unread on Telegram, and everything I could do to ignore her without blocking her. I started gaining my happiness back.

During this mess, I lost 5+ KG of weight. She has no friends in her mid 30s. Knows no life or survival skills. Her family hates her, no career, no emotional or mental maturity, literally nothing. Insanely dumb and toxic manipulative person who is not even worth being called an ex. As per her everyone around her is an asshole except her. Every time something happened, she used to blame and bad mouth the other person. Now she is doing with me. In all her life situations, either she was a hero or a victim. One upped me all the time. Now that I see it, I hate myself for allowing it all of it and now having enough self worth to walk out of it earlier.

Continued in comments...

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

I finally got Redux-Form’s `initialValues` to work! Wooooo~!

/giphy confetti cheering

It turns out I haven’t actually been doing anything wrong for the past week. I mean, I've been working on other things during that week, too, but I've been trying to solve this the entire time.

The cause? ReduxForm made a breaking change awhile ago (v5; we’re using v7) that prevents the `initialValues` prop from working if you decorate your form component in the wrong order. Many examples online are incorrect because of this.

Basically, the decorators `reduxForm` and `connect` do not commute:

Incorrect:
`reduxForm(...)( connect(..., {...})(form) )`

vs Correct:
`connect(..., {...})( reduxForm(...)(form) )`

But what really pisses me off is that the fucking documentation specifically fucking states that you may decorate your component IN ANY [FUCKING] ORDER.

/giphy that is [fucking] false

So, I've been following example after [fucking] example that either list these in the wrong order, or I just don't notice the different order because it doesn't matter. AND because of that NONE OF THE [...] EXAMPLES WORK.

ARGH.

I've been pacing around the office trying to figure this out for days. I've rewritten my code three times to try to solve this. I've written two workarounds for it only to rip them out and try again because they both broke some other part of the UX. (e.g. causing false validation errors after rerender)

just. hafhsldkjhgjkhagklwhsdjfkahslf. 😡

/giphy angry hades

You know how I discovered this?
I found it in a github ticket. One solitary, untagged ticket from October of last year. Not a single goddamn post anywhere else mentioned this. And the [...] documentation specifically [...] states the [...] opposite!

Bloody [...] hell.

but it finally works.
as;kgjhaekl;gahgjkdflssdafh.

I could scream.

A few weeks ago I stepped onto the grounds of lovely Canada. Back then - coming from Europe - I was surprised. Free WiFi everywhere without all the bells and whistles of creating an account and such.

Well ... at least I thought so ...

Today I went to a location where they actually charge you for their wireless services - fair enough the coverage area is pretty huge - and provide you with an access coupon. All good my optimistic me told me but once the login page loaded...

There are a lot of things about UX I could rant about but let's put that aside. The coupon came from the office where they KNEW all your contact details but it required you to create an account with all of them again to redeem the coupon.

Not only that but it asked for things like the phone number - obviously asking for a Canadian landline number since hell who uses mobiles anyway with numbers longer than ten characters?! - and even though it had a nice country selection it kept the states field there even when selecting a country that doesn't have states ...
Oh, and on a regular phone screen (which would be the target user for WiFi on a campground I suppose) the input fields for state and zip were occluded by the margins of the input rendering the content invisible.

And if that weren't enough after creating your account they made you watch an ad as if the personal data and the 4$ you paid them wasn't enough for the lousy 400 KB/s you get for 24h ...

Gets better though! After creating the account they display your password to make sure you remembered it ... over a non-secured WiFi network ... and send you an email afterward ... password via unencrypted mail via an unencrypted WIRELESS connection ... not that it protects anything that would matter anyways you can just snoop the MAC of your neighbor and get in that way or for that sake get their password but oh well ...

Gosh, sometimes I just feel the urgent need to find the ones responsible and tell them to GTFO of the IT world ...

Is it just me feeling like this about crappy UI/UX design? Always wondering...

Hello fellow DevRanters!

Recently I have put together a UX survey about DevRant! Us!

If anyone is interested in filling it out, I'd greatly appreciate it.

The more responses the better! If you have a friend or know anyone who is interested in filling it out then sharing is caring! If not, a ++ wouldn't hurt to spread the word :)

If you have any questions, feel free to comment down below.

Why?
I am required to do a UX report of an app of my choice for my University assignment - I thought, why not?

Motherfucking website style JavaScript rant ahead.

Just tried to register some travel tickets, at FlixBus. Of course alternatively I could go for a train but those would be more expensive. So yeah.

Turns out that the website loads JavaScript from 20 domains including 3 required CloudFront ones (those are the most annoying because it's not possible to tell by the domain what it would be doing). But alright, I'll take it. Web 3.0 amirite?

So I go and find myself a nice bus, add it to my cart.. oh shit it's the wrong one. Change some parameters, hit return.. well guess what. Turns out that in all their JavaScript glory they couldn't implement that much. Awesome!

Go to another site to get another ticket for my travel back, only to find out that while they couldn't implement return, their webdevs are apparently skilled enough to get a giant boner on blinking "(1) Almost ready!" in the site's title, when changing to another tab and there happens to be stuff in the cart. Do you really think I care about that shit! Don't distract me and let me get my shit done!!!

So, to all you webdevs who would pull something like this and wank on it too. Guess what motherfucker. That purchase got cancelled through the power of JavaScript wank, because there's no way I'm supporting that dystopian junk. Guess what, when people shell out money at your shitty online shop, they may want a quarter-ass decent UX too. And no notifications or any of that wank, you hear me?

But yeah fucking Web 3.0!!! Give me a fucking break.

So there's this developer I work with. Let's call him Kevin.

I am a UX designer, former Developer from IBM - but I really love design, so I made the switch. My background however, usually makes working with Developers easy.

But not this guy! I provided a clickable prototype complete with code to easily inspect with Dev tools for measurements. I provided mobile references for some screens but not all.

Kevin submits screenshots for me to review the design. Looks nothing like the prototype, so I get out my Wacom tablet and basically draw redlines over the screenshot. "No border here, 22px should be 20px, etc."

His response was:

"I need you to say exactly what you one (want?) each pages and mobile pages to look like, text size of the font, etc.

You did a lot of red marking, so I am asking for clarification."

So basically asking for red line specs. I asked a month ago if he wanted all the mobile screens, or if what I provided was enough along with the style guide. He agreed. So now I'm majorly pissed off.

Maybe it's also the fact that one of the other developers has to hold his hand, because everything he does is bad. 😡 And his lack of ability to articulate a damn sentence effectively drives me crazy. Cherry on top, I suppose.

Would love to bring this up with my boss. ♥️ And suggestions. 😍

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

Simple and accurate!
UI/UX makes a huge difference to average users. Just because you're the developer/expert user, do not think what's obvious to you is obvious to everyone. Think about being in a bubble. This is why you need collaboration with people in a different scope. Or atleast gather feedback from users.

One thing I learned over the years is that even when you think you can't do something or don't have the strength to do it, you actually can.

People do nothing better than to make excuses for themselves or blame others for the things they did without even considering that they could have done something about it.

The brain is a powerful processor to the point that when you think you're sick constantly your body will react accordingly.

Thing is though. If you don't take the opportunities that present themselves or don't look for them you'll probably get nowhere to the point where it could lead to depression.

Sure enough failures and mistakes happen all the time, ardly anything will go right the first time possibly leading to becoming demotivated and sometimes even depression.

Why? Because you forgot to think "what can I improve the next time"

A co-worker of mine keeps going back to his project he's working on because the boss has something in mind but somehow fails to translate it to him. He never stops to think what the desired functionality is compared to what it should do or look like (UI/UX). Eventually he snaps blaming the boss that he had to change it a couple of times.

This has happened multiple times since I started my Internship to the point where it just starts to irritate me.

Of course it's not always your fault but there are plenty of cases where it is or where you could have prevented it.

Mistakes and failures make you stronger only if you want to learn from them.

Have a good day

So, my boss was angry at me today because...
1. "Why are we taking so long to finish the software?". We started coding in March, and during that time I kept asking for requirements, design and his answer was, "You build it and we'll see." . During that time, after creating the system with only three type of user modes, he was like "Oh, I want customized user permissions." Took me 1 month to come up with a design, implementation for everything. Also during these months, nearly 2 months was wasted because he kept giving me other things to do, and I was not focusing in my current project.

Today he was mad because he expect me not only to build the infrastructure, setup servers, write backend code, do QA etc, He wants me to be a product designer. A fucking product designer. My answer to him was "If you refuse to help with designing the UX, either hire someone or I will just copy/paste things for internet. If the UI works, there's where my job is done."

Fucking hell. Not only I am being under payed, but he expects do to the job of 5 other people. Fuck this shit.

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

I’m tired of all these profane “frontend developers” who do nothing but get cheap internet points by shitting on web technologies.

Bitch, NPM is just a package manager. That’s what it is. Anyone who ever used a package manager already knows how to use NPM.

Here on devrant, there at your workplace, people hear nothing but bitching when you open your mouth. You always need a “solid task description” and “best practices”. You always need somebody else to do your job for you. Frontend is the area where you have to constantly switch between heavy, performance-oriented coding, UX and graphic design while remaining in a dynamic environment that is called “web”, no wonder why you can’t do that. Instead of bitching, you could just present your own solution you designed with just a little bit of product-oriented thinking. But noooo, you fucking bother designers whenever you’re not sure about “how many pixels is that padding”.

You can only be barely productive (and only with a frozen spec) but can never take the lead just once.

In the 80s your kind of approaches were doubted, by the 90s they were dead. In 2020s they’re straight up laughable.

And don’t get me started on CSS. You have to be an absolute buffoon of a developer to not know how to use a DECLARATIVE tool that don’t even require real structural thinking.

No wonder why you praise php. You throw shit all over the place and tell everybody that you’re a “sociopath” and you don’t need that “stupid frontend” and “stupid users”. But you know what? Any real backend or embedded dev would’ve laughed at your face.

Because backend developers are respected.

You’re not.

I can't believe this company has not hired a ux designer yet!

Team managers have no clear design principles to follow, they are coming up with design changes and ideas on the fly.

For fucks sake, at least provide a reference design or color sets to implement instead of complaining to me when i use hard colors like red / green / blue on first version of what you asked to do.

I hate doing minor style changes on code when you have no clear vision about the design.

I think the end product is gonna end up as a ux nightmare without a ux specialist.

PM and UX designer talks.

About a feature on android with viewpager (swipeable views) and a header with buttons.

PM : We need a back button and a close button on the header.
UX : A customer will be confused by both, with the swipe too.

PM : Then we need a close button alone.
UX : Customer will search for back button and not everyone might swipe left.

PM : We need a back button alone.
UX : Customer might not know how to close the view. He can't keep going back back back.

PM : we don't need any buttons.
UX : Customer should find it easy to close or go back.

PM : bruv.

So I ended up installing Arch Linux as the primary OS in my laptop, and to be honest, I'm not very crazy about it. Because I'm someone who likes an elegant UX, I spent three days and over 50 reboots and 5 reinstalls just trying to get Plymouth to work correctly (in the end, I just said screw it and gave up.) I know, I probably messed something up in the installation or configuration, but I didn't really want to deal with it anymore.

I'm not a big fan of the pacman package manager; I prefer apt. There were several applications I couldn't get to work properly, such as Steam, the Tor Browser, and Wine. All in all, I've basically wasted a week trying to get Arch Linux to work as the daily driver on my laptop, but I guess it's just not the distro for me.

I'm going to give Arch one last shot with the Manjaro distro. I'm hoping that Manjaro's simplified installation and configuration will produce a more usable (in my case) OS, and if not, I'll probably be going back to something Debian-based.

I'm not at all saying Arch is a bad distro. I know many people use it as their daily driver, and I have absolutely no problem with that. I'm not writing this to debate which distro is better, I'm just writing about my experience with it. Arch just may not be the distro for someone like me. At least I gave it a shot, right?

F*CK...that feeling when you were working as a junior UI/UX designer for about 3 weeks in new company, you were on a project which is almost finished and delivered...

1 and half week Later (after technical issues - check my older rants)......

you have noticed one quite importat mistake in the designs, which were done by senior designers, which can lead in future to a huge Ux problems - so huge, that users will probably leave/close the app and will not purchase the product via that app... ( We can say than whole design solution was a waste of money for the client)... On that designes was working a team of 4 people, about 3 Months (and the app (prototype) had to be ready already 2 Months back)...

the deadline was pushed 2x already...

And your boss (senior designer) tell you that this is not such an issue.. But thx for your opinion.....

1 week Later by user testing 4 out of 4 people were asking about that stuff I told to my boss that is missing...

And I was ignored...

In less than 1 week Later after the testing I get fired from the company without no reason...

Or better - the reason was:

I have too little experiences for this job...
Dont know if I should laugh or cry🤦‍♀️🤣/😭

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

Like any frontend dev working in an organisation, all of what I do are "designed" by an UX/UI designer. Now he fucking has a problem with me and has been going around saying he's gonna resign because of me. (Apparently he said that while walking away from where I was with the intention of it falling in my ears but I was oblivious to it).

On enquiring (to another colleague)why he has a problem with me he said I don't respect him. Perplexed(more curious), I asked what is it that I do to disrespect him and what I found out was out of the world.

I DISRESPECT HIM BY ASKING HIM QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WORK HE DOES.

Awesome, right? Not only does he consider that disrespect but he also takes it personally. WTH?! I'm not supposed to ask why you do a certain things?

Some of my questions -
1. Why are there font sizes of 13px, 14px, 15px right next to each other?
2. Why is there a gap between the sidebar and the content?
3. Why aren't even sizes being used?
Etc.

So much for maturity. He's completely ignoring me, be it on the floor or during meetings. I couldn't care less. It wouldn't take me much to tell him where he's fucking up. The only reason I asked him questions was to understand things better; maybe I don't understand what I find wrong.
But now ~(˘▾˘)~

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

One of our customers wants our mobile app to log out the user after 15 minutes of inactivity because of SeCuRiTy…

Why? The phones protect the apps with their hardware encryption from any malicious access.
And we are not dealing with super sensitive data here like some banking app or so.

Why do some people want to have bad UX for no reason?

Product and Design have a common enemy. Yes, you guessed it right, Engineering.

The former aim to solve user problems and focus heavily on aesthetics most of the time. While the latter actually does it.

As a Product guy, I admit that I absolutely hate the role these days because all that are asked to focus on is engagement retention conversion and other fancy metrics. Community has missed the entire point of why the fucking role exist.

On the other hand, engineering always asks the best questions. Focuses on performance and scale while periodically checking on tech debt. Yes, they suck at business or sales but when the solution works, things automatically make money.

I DON'T FUCKING CARE HOW BEAUTIFUL YOUR APP IS, IF IT DOESN'T SOLVE MY PROBLEM THEN IT'S RUBBISH.

Functionality and UX matters to more than colour scheme or fonts. Reason why Amazon is a huge. They are functionally solving a great problem while constantly improvising UX and not giving a rat's ass on UI.

Another down side to your fancy design is that the UI elements make things heavier. No wonder engineers have always been the best problem solver.

We lost our way. Tech world needs to go back a decade or two to fix the tech debt.

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

The platform my school is using was obviously designed and developed by people who hate students.

I've seen the teacher panel, and it looks really intuitive, allowing you to see test scores, missing assignments, attendance records easily, and it was obviously well thought-out

however, the UX as a student is a goddamn nightmare

First of all, there's like 5 different places where an instructor can post an assignment, so good luck keeping track of your work

Second of all, there's no way to sort assignments by completion status or due date. Just by when assigned

Third of all, the only way to see your grade in a class is if you dig through a series of menus and submenus and sidebars so complex and stupid it puts the Jira UI to shame

And finally, one of the 'features' of this platform is that students can submit a textbox with markdown formatting natively on the platform. And that should work great and all, but APPARENTLY THE FUCKING DEVELOPERS HAVE NEVER HEARD OF LOCALSTORAGE AND YOU JUST LOSE YOUR WORK IF YOU EVER CLOSE THE TAB FOR ANY REASON!

WITH NO FUCKING WARNING! NOT EVEN A LITTLE JAVASCRIPT ALERT OF ANYTHING!

JUST POOF! AN HOUR OF WORK GONE! YAY!

In conclusion, fuck you

This is probably VERY OLD, but why don't devRant supports Markdown? Having to upload (not paste or drag) code screenshots and having to UPPERCASE to yell or emphasize text feels... quite non-dev.
I found the bug repo and checked the Markdown issue has... almost three years.

I just came by the @highlight bot. Seriously? There are several layers of "wrong" with that hahah

Bonus: not very good UX to write a message, try to post it, and ONLY THEN get to know there's a time limit. This should show when you open the form, not when you submit it.... But I just sent a bug report on that, at least.

Bonus 2: if the char limit is 5k, why's the textbox so tiny on the web?

Udemy is full of crap.

I got some course that had been "discounted" from $200 (I already mentioned it is an ugly trick) and it was over in like 20 minutes. The fuck?!

All the info they gave was either common sense or something you could find on the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the given topic (it was a soft skills course, not a technical one).

Just junk.

Maybe there are some gems out there, but I'm not sure I would risk it again.

Udemy feels like the Booking.com of courses in terms of deceitful UX, but it's not nearly as useful.

Maybe you guys have found something good there that you could say is a bargain? If so, please let me know.

Been made redundant today.

Get some tissues cause imma spill my tea across your keyboards.

It was my first job. I was a UX designer.(I guess I have to use past tense?) I was there for 6 months. It was enjoyable and rewarding,slightly stressful because I worked for two companies under an umbrella company and was split 50-50.
I was told to come to work and I went and I saw one of my bosses in the room aswell ( I have two bosses btw - 2 companies)
The head of IT comes in and tells us we both have been made redundant as our company is not doing well ( its a travel company)...
I was shocked and I cried. I felt sorry for my boss he was there for ten yrs. And he has kids. I was told I could go home but I went to bathroom and cried. I came out and I didn't know if I was supposed to finish the day ( I had 3 meetings) or go home.... So I went to the meeting like a dumb dumb.
Most awk meeting because the other company didn't even know I was made redundant. The meeting was about how even though its a difficult time for us we r United and we aren't firing u guys just take unpaid holidays etc. Btw IT head was in that meeting was shocked to see me there ... I don't even know why I went. Anyways I found out they got rid of 174 employees across the umbrella company. I had to awkwardly tell my other boss I've been made redundant. He was shocked... I don't even know what to do. How to do. Sigh. I asked him if we wanted me to finish work off he's like do whatever u want to do.... I mean whattt.

Also does anyone know what a redudancy consultantion meeting is? It's my first job I have no idea what happens. Anyone here made redundant? How did u cope with it? Do u think I'm gonna get another job in this pandemic? Sorry I'm just a bit lost

I just contacted the support of one of our service provider for virtual tours. I told them that the iframe will open the website (in target self) instead of playing the tour, and that our clients will most likely not come back to our site, when they don't see a "go back" or something. Best would be, if the iframe plays instead of opening a new tab.

Supports answer: "I sent you a video, there you can see how to get back to your website"

*sends a video of themself opening his browsing history and clicking our site*

A dream of every UX developer.

Pinterest, one of the most wonderful and elegantly designed products has gone to rats.

The performance was smooth, the UX was kickass, the content was lit.

I once watched Ben's interview and absolutely loved his thought process on how he identified a problem and went ahead to build a solution for it.

Unlike Facebook/Instagram, which are designed to make you compete for dopamine shots and trigger jealousy, Pinterest was kind of different where you have a custom feed and yet no comparison or showing off. Cool right?

However, towards the end of the interview, Ben did mention that they are going (or already bagged) another round of cash. I was sceptical of why that was needed when they already had good reach, scaled product, and overall a stable ecosystem. They could instead focus on exit plans.

Pinterst has become a piece of garbage now. Cluttered with all the original features, which made it different, have been taken away. Moreover, not only the product is complicated and difficult to understand (let alone use), it is bloated with ads. The amount of ads and redirection of every search result to their shopping tab is just nauseating.

Feed has same content for days, if not weeks. You can no way customise the content been showcased and no matter how many times you report unwanted or inappropriate images, shit still shows up. The algo is rusted now.

Remember kids, this is NOT how you build and grow products. Lesson learned, capitalism has the power to destroy everything.

Client wants something that makes no sense in UX land. We tell them that it makes no sense. Client doesn't listen, tells us to do it anyway.

We do it anyway. Client has doubts about a small detail of the implementation. And asks us what our advice would be.

My advice would be that you start listening to the professionals. How am I supposed to give "advice" on a detail of something I disagree with in general?

Her: "I'm going to cut off one of my hands."

Me: "I recommend you do not do that."

Her? "Would you cut off the left or the right hand? I can't decide."

Me, saying: "I have no preference in this."

Me, thinking: "You should cut off your fucking ears, you're obviously not using them."

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.

While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.

Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.

So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.

For me it was not do much a choice.

I started out using basic and simple text display (graphics existed but was quite difficult).

For a long time I was the sole or part of a pair of devs so specializing was not possible and once we grew to such a size I already was quite proficient in all areas from hardware to customer support and education.

But from that time onto today I have gravitated towards a more backend role mainly because I lack a good sense or visual design.

I know it something looks good, but doing it my self results in more boring or plain designs where more thought goes into UX than nice looking design.

That said, if we do web applications I can still keep up since it usually is more ux heavy ;)

But when it comes to adding background images, nice color sets and such I gladly defer that to colleagues with a better design sense.

It sometimes really sucks to see how many developers, mostly even much better than me, are too lazy to implement a function to its full UX finish.

Like how can you not implement pagination if you know there's going to be fuck ton of content, how can you not allow deleting entries, how can there be no proper search of content, but instead some google custom search, how can you not implement infinite loading everywhere, but only in parts of your application, how can you not caching a rendered version or improve the page, that loads EVERY SINGLE ENTRY in your database with 11k entries, by just adding a filter and loading only chunks of it.

I know sometimes you need to cut corners, but there's rarely any excuse with modern toolsets to just write 3 lines more and have it ready for such basic things.

I sometimes just wake up during the night or before falling asleep and think "oh, what if in the future he might want to manage that, it's just another view and another function handling a resource, laravel makes that very easy anyway", write in on my list and do it in a blink the next day, if there's nothing else like a major bug.

I have such high standard of delivery for myself, that it feels so weird, how somebody can just deliver such a shitty codebase (e.g. filled with "quick/temporary implementations"), not think of the future of the application or the complete user and or admin experience.

Especially it almost hurts seeing somebody so much more versatile in so many areas than me do it, like you perfectly fine know how to cache it in redis, you probably know a fuck ton of other ways I don't even know of yet to do it, yet you decide to make it such a fucking piece of shit and call it finished.

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

What is it with shipping websites sending you an email saying "hey, here's your tracking number and tracking URL!" and then that *very same link* saying "this tracking number doesn't exist, it can take a few days to show up sometimes, try again!" I'd understand if this was one knock-off weird company, but it seems to be *all of them*.

Seriously, how hard is it to just initialise a tracking number at the point you send that email so it at least shows a "parcel not yet picked up" or similar message? I know it doesn't make much material difference to tracking but it just reeks of bad UX and lazy / incompetent devs.

In my experience, any BE dev or old architect/lead programmer that says they “can do frontend” does shit like writing Ajax calls in script tags directly in the html. They are the ones who add style attributes directly in html. They are the ones who google how to center a div and they still use float positioning because all of them are old, arrogant BE devs who get caught in a single framework who convince themselves they are an expert. They can’t give any good UX advice. They don’t know how to use a screen reader. They don’t know what WCAG means. They don’t constantly keep up to date on what browsers are supporting and what’s being released in the unstable versions. They don’t know what a web component is. They don’t know what a closure is. They don’t know anything about optimizing web perf metrics. They couldn’t tell you what web crawlers look for. They couldn’t tell you anything about design principles and anti-patterns. They don’t know how to manage a web application that will be seen by millions AND keep it nice, shiny, and refactorable on the code side. What do they really fucking know? how to write an MVC app? How to connect APIs and integrate code that other people wrote? I do full stack all day and writing anything not-client-facing is super easy.

Take that stick out of your ass and get over yourself you asshole. You haven’t written anything close to amazing even though you constantly act like you’re a god-tier programmer and your shit doesn’t stink.

Hit the books like the rest of us you fuck.

The Frontend is anything but fucking easy.

After I was woken up in the morning by my friend that had a meeting nearby.
We went for coffee and as part of usual Wednesday I also decided to go to cinema to see Dr Dollitle ( not verry funny ).

I felt relaxed as everyone fucked off from me since Monday.

I was so happy of doing nothing after the movie I decided to try to make both frontend and backend for new application screens in finite time.

I could have waited for frontend developer to be back from his vacation but since I can also do it I decided to do it myself.

I did frontend part first with mock data and after finishing it before 2 pm asked if client will have time to discuss it. He didn’t so we decided I try to add real data and publish it on test environment.

Well those are mock up screens anyway so I decided to eat and smoke to chill but also try to work anyway.

I just finished backend for those screens and switched test environment to new branch.
Looks like they’re working for biggest client customers.

Usually it takes about a week or two to describe frontend developer what client wants but let’s see if I still have some frontend UX empathy left and can speed up development by couple of days.

Youtube UX on iPhone. Fucking annoying! In fact google or alphabet have completely disengaged with the user on virtually everything. It's not a game, people have to actually use this shit.

When you have to awk tell your boss that having that tenth icon in the header menu is not really UX friendly I feel like I punched a puppy cause his face fell and a small part of him died...

Any UX designers/engineers here? :(
What's the thing that annoys you about UX designers? Or designers in general? Just this is my first job so I don't wanna annoy any developer...
Sorry this is so random.. Anyways have a lovely Sunday evening..

I get amazed almost every work day by how buggy the File Explorer is in Windows 11.

Actually, it's the whole Microsoft experience, that never worked for me. Most products are not at all intuitive (e.g. Google Sheet UX > Microsoft Excel UX), some other products shouldn't even be released (e.g. I've tried Loop, which is supposed to be a Notion clone, but it's more like a cheap demo).

I really need to start insisting about Linux, so my employer allows me an installation (or at least they could provide a Mac, if Linux doesn't cut it)

I'm getting tired of coding. Not really the coding part, the dealing with people who tell me what to code and why part. Sort of considering making a move into a scrum master or PM role just so I can get fired when I say "No, we're not changing everything they've been working on in the middle of the sprint" or maybe "Yeah, no we're not going to put in a bunch of tickets to change the UI/UX without first talking to the designers, because that's what they do. Yes, I realize we aren't Facebook, but do you realize we "compete" with them because a huge number of people will compare our usability to theirs? (even if just subconsciously)"

I’m working on a react codebase and company decided to add a new module.
Now im writing markup and css to ensure UX is smooth as designers thought of it.
Imagine my horror when I start to code and find out no matter what HTML tag i use, it’s been FUCKING OVERRIDDEN in the global stylesheet. AND STYLES HAVE BEEN OVERRIDDEN WITH !important

They’re also using Ant design as a component library. Guess what, default ant design classes have been overridden too. So i try to use ant design button or card, and bam, MAGICALLY SOME DESIGN FROM SOME SHITHOLE MODULE DECIDES TO FUCK WITH MY STYLES

On top of that, styles of parts of application has been written in SASS, some part of application uses bootstrap components some use third party components like tables and responsive grids to suit to their preferences. Some parts use handwritten css. Some parts use CSS IN JS and styled components. THE FUCK IS THIS GARBAGE!!!! THE FUCKING CODEBASE HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN!!!!!! YOU NAME A WAY TO ADD STYLES TO A COMPONENT, ITS THERE!!!
And the company’s management thought a “fractal” approach to maintain each individual view is “best” for SCALABILITY!!! HOW THE FUCK DID IT NOT CROSS YOUR DUMB MIND THAT FRACTAL APPROACH ALSO GUIDES TO HAVE ALL COMMON STUFF AT ONE PLACE!!!! THIS CODEBASE HAS DUPLICATE STYLES AND DUPLICATE CODE IN ALMOST EVERY MODULE!!!!

Not to mention every developer choosing to freely decide the way they should write their code without any guidelines.

HOW THE FUCK PEOPLE WRITE THEIR CODE WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT OTHER DEVS!!! SO BASICALLY I AM NOT ONLY CLEANING SOMEONE ELSE’S SHIT BUT ALSO TRY NOT TO SHIT IN THE PROCESS!! FML

I hate this feeling.

Changing stuff with a greamripers scythe around my neck called doubt because the available data isn't too convincing.

Then having to go big or nothing as it is an ecosystem change (e.g. changing the cipher suites of TLS, changing protocol - e.g. HTTP 1.1 to 2) so it needs to be consistent as otherwise fun stuff could happen (fun as in the grim reaper cuts off my neck except a few centimeters and plays "now your head is off, now your head is on" ).

To top it off - just few seconds after the change has happened people coming up in the support channel.

My hands are - mysteriously - not sweaty then. Rather cold.

Lil prayer to the heavens and getting the whiskey bottle...

Opening an ongoing discussion in support channel....

And they're discussing whether the page needs to have an additional arrow for going back to the last page or if the default page navigation is enough.

Constantly using @all so everyone gets pissed off due to being pinged every few seconds in a channel that was meant for emergency support.

Now my hands go from a dark red to a bright red, my nostrils flare out, my adrenaline goes through the roof and I literally wanna murder people....

Those days.

I hate those days.

And I hate the timing of some people...

Like they're deliberately fucking with me without knowing it, like the universe told them explicitly to do so just to fuck with me.

*gooozfraba*

And of course, everything else is fine and running smooth like butter, except that said discussion now goes on in a total flamewar so I get even more pings.

Sucks to be in management.

You have way to many rooms where people can annoy you.

To top it off - after being grumpy and pissed and angry for people just annoying the fuck out of me, I have to mediate.

Yeah. Cause the usual person is on vacancy.

*slowly strangling the whiskey bottle like homer does with bart*

Turns out after 15 mins listening to enraged UX designer vs Frontend Team Lead that UX designer meant a completely different thing - uploaded wrong screenshot, whole discussion was unnecessary.

*Nah. Fuck it. Drinking whiskey*

Reminding everyone what the fucking frigging support channel is meant for and that penis fights aka who got the longest schlong don't belong there....

"Yeah it was a mistake, but it wasn't so bad"
...

You pinged fucking 32 people like it was the end of the world, you ignorant fucktwads.

For over 5 mins.

For fucking frigging nothing except your tiny dicks and shitty egos.

*Second round of whiskey*

Back to work after a wasted half hour.

What says monitoring?

Ah. Everything's working.

At least luck hasn't failed me.

Good server. Brave server.

Then I hear this lil voice in my head: no.

The servers know your personality.

They're afraid. Terrified.

Somehow that thought makes me giggle always...

Childish? Maybe. But it helps on those days.... Funnily enough, remaining 3 hours noone said anything in any chat channel.

"I wonder why, I wonder how...."... *hum*

Well, been awhile. The latter half of this is probably gonna be unpopular, but the gist of it is that all of the devs working on camera-centric apps, get your shit together, if possible. As mentioned there may not be a way for you to get your shit together, because Google and the others involved ultimately are a mess. In that case, you're dismissed. I haven't proof-read this, so don't take it exactly verbatim.

Woke up this morning to a need for this, so here goes:

----
OPEN LETTER TO SNAPCHAT
----
Snapchat,

You guys need to get your shit together. This is a tack-on to what Marques Brownlee already stated.

I woke up this morning to a seriously FUCKED UP UI. UX didn't change as much, still looks Snapchat-esque. But holy hell WHAT THE FUCK?

I'm not averse to change, despite the above. HOWEVER, there's an exception to that: You cannot change out UX/UI from under me with no warning. I need to know that within the coming weeks, there will be changes to how I interact/interface within the app. An option to opt into testing would be nice as well, but doesn't look like you guys have that figured out. With that testing should come feedback, and something like Jira, where issues can be reported and triaged. You're a company, unfortunately, so I doubt you'd be willing to even go as far as accepting feedback in the first place, which is a shame.

Seriously, as Marques pointed out, Android Snaps are shitty because the app takes a screenshot of the viewfinder and uses it as a photo. There's no doubt in my mind this is something that others do, but all Android devs need to either not pull this (because it's not clever) or just not make apps (quality over quantity).

I would like to see either Google step in and require a native API that is the same across all devices and leverages all cameras to their full potential (I want to say that Snap's issue stems from an API provided by Google. In this case, Google, get your shit together), or alternatively I'd like to see manufacturers band up to provide a uniform interface to deal with this. Because I don't see the latter happening anytime soon, Google needs to do something about this, although I feel like they probably won't. That said, IDGAF WHO it is, I just want it FIXED.

Please don't use shake animations to signify errors, dear user interface designers.

The shake animation is a bad idea introduced to the UX (user experience) world by Apple in 2013 with iOS 7 and Mac OS, and is popularly used by FilePond in response to a failed upload. At some point, this animation was added to the Cinnamon desktop environment login screen in response to a wrong password.

The shake animation is not helpful at all. If anything, it is irritating and provocative.

The red "incorrect password" or "failed upload" text clarifies it well enough. There is no need for a shake animation to rub it into the user's face.

Does anyone think tech recruiters are failed used car salesmen?

Bad experiences this week

One reached out to me on clearance jobs to apply for a job that I applied for, interviewed and was turned down for because of course they do not know Javascript is not Java and they were looking for a Java developer. She didn’t remember and then never responded. Out of spite I replied all to the last email that company sent me but of course no one responded.

This person who says that she is a recruiter for GOOGLE does not know the difference from UX designer and UX developer.

“ UX design still involves coding... idk where you got information that UX designers don't code but they absolutely do. UX designers are simply front end software engineers that work on refining the user experience of a particular program app or website.”

I don’t know because I used to be a fucking UX developer and used to work with UX designers??? Who didn’t code because figuring out what humans what is tough enough on it’s own. UI designers may know html/css but that is it.

I know we are going into a recession and I need to start being nice to these dumb recruiters because I may need them one day.

Does anyone else find it strange that the stupidest people in the company are making all the decisions.

In order to be able to engineer software you have to understand everything that the product owner knows, the business analyst knows, the product manager knows + how to actually make the system both work in a reasonable time frame and be maintainable long-term.

But we're not the one making the decisions. The irony of it is something that I can't get beyond.

And when I do go out on a limb to point out a logical inconsistency to UX or product... They don't thank me for it they hate me for it and then 3 days later figure out that they should be doing it and quietly follow my suggestions.

Seriously is the goal here to create good software or to avoid stepping on everyone else's toes in the company who is overwhelmed by the complexity of the project.

I think companies based on a hierarchy of non-technical people controlling technical people, in the creation of software products are a dying breed.

When it comes to creating software products everyone in the hierarchy should be technically minded.

I've seriously been trying to come up with an alternative perspective here.

The executives of the company are completely out of touch and the only thing which looks like progress to them in a sprint review is something visual on the front end.

The technical architect, the product owner and the product manager all seem to be engaged in keeping the executives happy and managing their expectations. By means of obscuring the truth.

Imagine how much more cost-effective building a software product would be if the executives were engineers themselves.

I'm keen to do an experiment and build a company comprised of engineers only.

Obviously they need to have insight into the other roles. But none of these other roles are as complex as implementation itself.

So why exactly are we the slaves of these well-meaning under thinkers?

anybody else hate AWS UX/UI

i'd like to think with all that money they could make an idiot proof one for people like me, but i guess im too much of a smooth brained outlier or it's not worth it for them

For credential errors on login forms..

Do you guys follow the “OWASP standard” and won’t let the user know which field (email or password) was incorrect, just a general message or the more UX-way and let them know that it is for example the password that doesn’t match with given email (if it exists)? 🤔

Had a minor “discussion” about this with our sales-guy this afternoon why that I’m (as the full-stack, and only, developer there) not that of a fan about the UX-way.. (even thou ‘security’ is a “myth”). 😁

What use is a frontend developer (having exclusively frontend development knowledge) that's not a designer / isn't good at design.
Sorry if I'm being harsh, but you're either a web developer, knowing how to build web apps (or websites, or whatever), or a UX developer or whatever, knowing how to do pretty (and usable and accessible and...) things. Or even both.
Lemme say it differently. You either come from a web design and build a frontend, or come from the development of an application (database, logic, architecture, APIs, etc., backend++) and build a frontend for it. Again, or both.
Not being able to design, and not being able to build a product, is just... nothing? You're in the middle.
Sorry, but I don't think you're a developer. Maybe a coder.

Working in an expanding business is mostly fun, can be kind of challenging (for those who don't like to step in and do what's needed). One thing in particular you need to do a lot - is interviews. Lot's of them.
There are alsways two sides of the coin, for sure. But, just a little tip/hint to everyone looking for a job - please, please, please make sure your CV and letter at least makes sense for the position you're trying to get.

This (screenshot) is just one example of things in a CV which really makes me want to shout and kick people out.
It's part of the front page of a CV, for someone who is looking for a position as front-end developer / UX specialist. This person claims to be very interested in UX, and has done wome work already in this field.

Can ANYONE explain to med WHAT THE F*CK this actually means?
1) How many stars can a row have? 10, 6, 8?
2) What does it mean to have 4 starss in PHP knowledge? What's lacking to get 5?
3) What's the scale based on, at all?

And you want me to hire to to do UX of loyalty communication (e-mail, mobile apps, websites/landing pages) for our customers - who in turn have millions of customers/prospects?!?
ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME?
If you can't even make a visualization of your _own_ knowledge which can be interpreted into some sort of competence matrix, but you just use something you think looks cool... Damn, you could at least have tried.

Had an interview yesterday for a UI UX front end position with someone that had about 3 months of experience, all from a bootcamp. For a beginner it was ok, your run of the mill projects whose CSS framework you can tell at a glance. The guy finished the interview by pointing out that people from his bootcamp were getting offers of around X, where X is around 50% higher than engineers with 5+ years of experience usually get.

I'm not sure if he was trying to bullshit me, or if he seriously thought that was a standard salary. Or maybe he was some savant and I was too dumb to realize it.

It really grinds my gears when new hires just start adding themselves to every fucking slack channel and then start crapping up the channel history with irrelevant chatter.

Business Analysts and Project Managers do not need to be in #developers sending mock-ups to a UI/UX designer for one team, or posting an xkcd strip you found on the internet because you "got it" and you think you are proving that you are one of us by posting it there. This channel isn't a fucking club, its where ALL developers at this company across all teams share tools and practices for us to maintain consistency and best practices and to improve our craft, or to give a heads-up about vulnerabilities.

There is a specific channel for your role, and your project. You don't need to be everywhere and in every conversation. And for fuck's sake, PLEASE stop @someone adding people to these channels just because you think you saw something in there posted by someone else that they should see. You can just fucking share that message directly with that person, or in another channel.

I don't know maybe it's me. I'm sure that at booking.com they have hundred of GUI/UX/UI experts, product owners, A/B testing and whatever.

So, please, can you explain to me in a professional and scientific why, why the fuck, when I search for an hotel in a place for a date, by default, they show me UNAVAILABLE properties?

Like, "hey sorry, there was this great hotel, right in the center and very cheap, but you missed it!! hahahaha, you poor moron"

And every time I have to ACTIVATE the fucking filter myself "only show available properties".

Excuse me? Who want to see in first position the hotels that are NOT available?

Are there some users out there who wants that? If I were hired at booking.com as Product Owner or UX/UI expert, I think the first thing I'll propose is to quit the fucking filter whatsoever or at least to enable it by design.

So why is that? you want to show off? slap me in the face, with your hard cock-list of hotels you have anyway, but not for me?

Hi there everyone am Shreyas a CS student. Am a C# guy and learn the parts of language every day (recently learning Asp.net) and having a lot of intrest, knowledge and passion in buildling stuff in it with WPF, Xamarin. And also i do practice a lot in it everyday.
But recently I am getting a lot more intrest in UI/UX designing. Am finding myself watching more UI/UX designing (mostly in Adobe Xd and illustrator) videos on YT (dansky YouTube channel specifically) rather than C# which I used to watch in early days.
So what is your suggestion on it? Should I learn the UI/UX designing basics. Will it help me in future, if I become a developer on building applications for mobile and desktop in C#?
Am pretty confused with it? Should I learn it or not?

Customers CEO insists we need to start the 3 weeks to deliver crunch website project by having the hottest UX design on the planet done by a professional UX specialist specializing in hotness who might charge a lot and take a few weeks and leave us no time to deliver said hotness. Grrrr.
I felt like Sirus Black as a dog bouncing of the chest of the werewolf.
When I explained in full why it's a great idea to have a great UX concept, the project is an education website, for the government, and it's WCAG AA. Balanced against all the reasons that we had more urgent things to look at with such a short timeframe they insisted "The UX Guy" will save us. Dear fascist bully boy. I am a UX guy! I may not be "The UX Guy" but I remember when Javascript was for popups and the extent of most peoples PHP was sending forms via anonymous SMTP. I bet the design will look something like the CNN website or Apple.com. Both bastions of web accessibility standards. Grrrrrr.

@dfox @trogus

Kinda’ NOT(x+x) = rant, but still would like to have some way of direct message system in the app, i guess it will be added in the near future but im getting more frustrated by the hour when not being able to communicate directly with a user without a mention publicly and offtopic’ing the main rant’s subject.

Another thing would be cool to have the app in landscape mode without losing its ui/ux integrity. Think “iphone 6” ergonomics when at restful position.

Just realized how monstrous this app could get and be if the team grew and started implementing shit ton of APIs to connect and centralize every coding dev scheme.

And not sure if its okay or not but, I just mentioned myself! XD iMessages dejavu?

Wtf is ux researcher or design thinkers etc? Seems like bs jobs to me. Why not hire good frontend devs who has a good understanding of ux/ui?

Companies please pay devs well instead of wasting money on these bs roles and positions.

Can we acknowledge how devrant sucks in terms of UX/UI? I mean, the desktop feels like a lazy copy of a mobile app whereas the mobile web version doesn’t even have a menu( not even including the many other issues on mobile). Feels like the devs of devrant are more focused on ranting about their own job than coming up with a better design/ functionality and / or adding PWA support and are forcing us to use their app

I tell a designer at the company to take a look at a (huge) corporate web project we're currently building. He's not assigned to the project, but I thought a fresh eye and recommendations could be good for future Sprints, since we're doing a first release in a month.

The guy knew all of this, yet his "designer a.k.a artistic spirit" couldn't hold him from sending a UI/UX review to the PM, of about 6-7 pages or smth - I dont even remember now.

The whole report had a total misunderstanding of the business logics, because he didn't even wait for me to explain that shit to him. Eventually his versions of UX suggestions were irrelevant. It was pretty funny, now that i think about it.
I'm guessing he just hoped to get some attention...?

tldr: its fucking disgusting when designers try to act as artists;

Git is overrated. There's absolutely no good reason that `git add` should be default to call before `git commit`, if people don't want files added that should be the exception not the rule. But where it all really falls apart is mono repos. There's no good way to make a repo inside a repo, which is fucking stupid. There's no good way to clone just a chunk of a repo, which is fucking stupid. And -- just in general -- every aspect of git feels like it wasn't designed to be usable. For instance: there should be a command `git save "message"` which does the default `git add ., git commit -m "message" git push`. Or rebasing, that doesn't need to be so hard at all.

This is just a rant and all, but I'm so tired of git being clunky and poorly designed from a UX perspective. And not supporting mono-repos for shit.

Whatever be the current trend on Linked-In, at the end of the day the product development life cycle remains quite the same.

Still, as developers which general domains in software do you think would flourish in the near future?

My picks (not in order) -
>> Cyber security : automation, both offensive and defensive
>> Block chain : trustable data platforms
>> Applied AI : a few key models, applied to all niches, bettering existing UX
>> IOT : wearables, embeddables, smart appliances
>> AR : Navigation prompts, real time info about real life objects
>> VR : Immerse entertainment. (Metaverse 🤮)
>> Quantum computing : first gen costly commercial releases, new algos

What would you add or subtract from this?

How difficult is it to decide for your own future?
It's a month that I'm in total panic 'cause of a difficult choice I have to make about my job.
I really need some external opinions and points of view from other developers, maybe more experienced than me (I'm a medium-junior JS developer).

The situation is as follows:

1) I work as a Frontend Web Developer for a wonderful enterprise-like company with 100+ employees, where the individual rights are fully respected, there are no whatsoever pressures and there is a peaceful paradise-like atmosphere most of the days. I also love my teammates, which is something rare because I often dislike other humans.
2) I received a proposal from a Fintech startup, which required me a long time to complete a complex programming test they gave me. They look all very young, modern, fast and passioned about their job. But they are only living with bank's investments and are not producing any money at the moment. Also, I don't know if Fintech will be a successful field in the future.
3) I received another proposal, from a Healthtec startup this time, which has a lovely mission in the medical field, has received millions of investments, it's gaining some KK net each month but has a team of only 2 developers (3 with me if I accept). I know one of the developers and I remember he had issues of not getting paid months ago.

What's the problem with the first company? I totally dislike the product we are building, the development stack (fully Microsoft-based), the company's view (they still sell and think about software like in the 90's) and how the repository is managed. Everyday there are huge problems that end up blocking the frontend work and the final product is super ugly and works only if you know all the quirks behind it.
It's an old-fashioned desktop app with inside Chromium which should execute some components like graphs, tables, forms and shit like this. Every component is configurable through a property editor which is an utter giant mess of collapsed menus. I also suspect that the company's main business model is based on the difficulty to use this software (because they sell licenses and courses to use it).
There are no modern UX/UI concepts applied at all, nor they seem to care about it.
Each time I propose something there is a huge chain of approval-waiting that end up in a stale mate.
Also, it's useless to show my frustration about all these issues because I count very little in a so populated office.

------------------------------------------------
TLDR: I need to choice if staying in a Enterprise Microsoft-based and old-fashioned company, but in which the atmosphere is paradisiac or accept the risk to work for a Fintech or a Healthtec startup.
------------------------------------------------

What would you do if you were in my situation? What's for you the most stable field in the future?
Many thanks for the attention!

A close button for a filter menu, according to UX, users could not figure out how to close it... We guessed those sames users also do not use windows, linux or mac os... WTF

Not a rant more of a guidance question. That being said,

What are some of the best websites, tutorials, books to becoming a UI/UX designer? Or just a graphic designer?

Thank you all in advance 😁

[opinions welcome]
I'm just furious right now!!!

So I'm on this project where we have to make a whole *very old* website look like it's brand new.

Thing is, the whole point of the project is to make exactly the same pages as on the existing website smh. No UX or UI suggestions.
Just put the navbar in a component that looks like a tab bar, who cares anyway!?

Btw, I'm in charge of the UI.

My colleagues and I (mostly my colleagues) made a react components library and we use it for this project.
Fucking inputs get thrown into tables and all that, but hey, that's what the client asked for.

So here I am with my shiny new page, and I just hand it over to the front-end dev who just arrived.
She's supposed to feed in the data.
I don't give a fuck you use flow or redux or whatever fancy tooling.
Just call your back-end, get the data, format it and feed my damn table with it. That's it.

So today, after 5 weeks she's in, she calls a meeting where she's screening a presentation to the team complaining about how long it took her to understand what I did and change it completely.
Pieces of code on screen, saying it's crap and it shouldn't be like that.

I'm not responsible for inputs in fucking table, the client is!
Of course I have nested components with data passed through all the way: it's a series of fucking radio buttons within a table within a form!

During 5 weeks, yoy didn't even come to me once saying it's not what you expected or you're having trouble with my work!
And there we blaming my job like I'm the bad guy?!

Tonight, everyone's going home thinking I'm no good at what I do and completely lost, all because of her.

If you got this far, I'd like to hear from you on how I should act with her and how to tell her what she did is awfully wrong?

Following some new nextjs tutorial to learn how to efficiently build a web chat app, the guy built it very solid, but is it efficient?

Im having mixed feelings about this approach. The way he did it is, for example when you click on a user (imagine it as a list of users from your contacts), it actually calls a route, which stores that in database, and once its done Then the route triggers lets say socket.io event to notify the frontend to update the UI.

Not only that but each new message that gets sent it actually calls a route which stores that message in database and once that's successful Then it emits a socket.io event to the frontend to fetch that message.

As you can imagine constantly calling routes like this Does induce small delays. Creating conversations, navigating, opening someones profile and especially sending messages, is NOT instantaneous. When you do it theres a small delay, giving the impression as if the app is SO large that it lags

But it doesnt lag, it just needs a few ms to store that in db so it can return the socket.io bidirectional message event. Which does make sense because what if the internet broke and the user immediately gets sent a message, but the message fails to get stored in database? Or db storage gets fucked or something else fails but socket.io works while db doesnt? The data then may be inconsistent. This approach fulfulls the single source of truth principle

So thats why im having mixed feelings about this approach particularly because of small delays. It is not instantaneous like whatsapp discord telegram signal viber etc the input UI freezes until the message is successfully sent

---

Of course this can be a UI/UX decision and can be handled differently even if the backend works like that.

My concern is is this approach valid?

My question is... I had an idea what if i emit socket.io event to send the message while in the background also call the route to store that message in db? This way not only would it work asynchronously but the message gets sent instantaneously, and if the backend fucks up to store it in db then the UI gets updated with message failed to get delivered, switching the socket.io into polling state. Is this a good (proper, efficient, better) way to do it or not?

I fucking hate mobile and iPad ui and general ux. I hate that I get shit for not being able to fix people's problems on them quickly enough with or without googling. Apparently that's my fucking line of work, no I'm just a fucking code monkey, I don't know where whichever asshat hide the setting to Jimmy or abysmal fucking browser implementations in fucking mobile chrome that makes it unable for you to buy car parts but it fucking works fine on a desktop browser. I ront want to reset your fucking weak passwords because you never remember them.

I can't even change my fucking phones background, or figure out or I lack voicemail because my plan or the fucking optoknnisnt present (one plus 2) and don't care enough to put more time or google it.

Maybe I'm just fucking incompetent. I like being able just to right click shift on desktop, going to properties or running both commands.

I never will stop being an imposter until I can fucking fix anything like a legit engineer.

Is a calendar view that starts on a Monday column a bad or unusual UX? I'm used to seeing Sunday on the leftmost and Saturday on the rightmost. I'm not sure about other cultures. It's one of my tasks at work. Thank you.

Some people please help with the ux on flip, it does not work and causes problems, what are your suggestions, or plans?