Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

I worked at a startup. They wanted to "save" money. So they hired a relative of "Fred" named "Bubba". Bubba made a custom website. Like hand built gifs and who knows how hand crafted html. It was fine for a time. Then somebody was wondering why nobody was calling us at the company. No customers. Another relative named "George" (who was actually a business major) looked at the website. It had been hacked and replaced with Jedis fighting Sith Lords. Me and another engineer named "Zeus" said "fuck this shit" and said "we are redoing this shit".

So I logged into godaddy (I know, shitty) and installed Wordpress (kinda shitty). I proceeded to turn wordpress into a half decent page. Wiped out the shit that was there, reused images as it made sense. Created more images. Reduced images to 80% quality to take loading size from 10MB to <1MB. Then I also proceeded to do SEO work and get the website listed properly within about a month. Customers started calling all the time. I had a simple contact form that barely gets any shit on it due to captcha. The was 5 years ago. I left 3 years ago (still help them on weekends) and nobody has done shit with the website. They are still getting calls and it hasn't been hacked.

We don't talk to Bubba. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing. I wonder if he still does websites for his relatives. I honestly had no clue what I was doing, but my take on the approach was easier to maintain and even George and Zeus and the new manager "Ralph" can maintain it, kinda. Went from shitty static website to full on dynamic and interactive. Yeah, I know, "dynamic". But the manager was happy.

Sometimes you just do what you gotta do in addition to doing all the electrical and software engineering for a company.

here's a shoutout to 90% of websites today:

NO, I DO NOT WANT YOUR F*CKING NEWSLETTER! STOP ASKING!

NO, I DO NOT WANT YOUR F*CKING NOTIFICATION! STOP ASKING!

NO, I DO NOT WANT TO SHARE MY F*CKING LOCATION! STOP ASKING!

NO, I DO NOT WANT ANY F*CKING COOKIES! STOP ASKING!

website publishers ary whining about adblockers, but keep shoving so much shit down our throats that even a dozen browser addons can't make the web usable. the internet was such a great place once, where did we go wrong?

(rhetorical question. it's when we made access to the internet so easy, that every 100% tech-illiterate idiot could get online.)

Story of onboarding in the age of Corona!

Monday:
Office is big but almost empty, people are working from home. Guy welcoming me says he is not the one supposed to help me(he is sick I'm told) and the rest of the team is not there. The man I'm talking to is this other guys boss. It's OK I think it will work out.

Turns out this guy helping me is actually the CTO so he does not have that much time on his hands. He shows me were to get my computer and desk and hands me documentation to setup some software.

I spend the time before lunch installing linux, setting up git and some other software. CTO checks up on me once.

Then after lunch nothing...I look for him but he is in some meeting. I find some videos by myself labled "onboarding" on the company website. They are OK. I ask my deskmate if he heard what team I will be in. He doesn't know. I sneak out a little early since I have nothing left to do.

Tuesday:
The CTO is now also sick I see in an email when I arrive at the office. Still don't know what team I am in.

I spend the morning reading coding blogs and websites. After lunch I have a meeting. The only one in my calendar. It's about the product software architecture for all new employees. It's good but still no news about what team. I aimlessly read up on some software architecture untill I go home.

Wednesday:
I arrive at the office first, only the receptionist is there. I listen to podcasts until a few more people show up. I ask another guy if he knows what team I'm supposed to be in. He doesn't but laughs and says it was the same when he started last year.

I send out messages on slack looking for anyone that knows...still no one knows. I guess Im in limbo now. Perhaps i should just start making coffee for people or something...

There is a special place in hell for people that do custom smooth scrolling on their websites.

Why are there a million websites that scrap and republish stack overflow content? SEO induced page hits for fraudulent publicity?
Whatever the reason I hate them so much.

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

Special 2022 greetings to the last of us who still run truly static websites: update your footer template, recompile, upload.

The WP Gutenberg editor is really amazing. Clients can now fuck up their websites with much less effort. So yeah, IT IS FASTER.

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

People are incredibly rude and ill mannered.

New company stories.

Whenever I am in office and having a conversation with a person, someone randomly appears (like those annoying pop-ups on websites) and interrupts the conversation and starts with their own.

I don't understand why people don't wait for the conversation to be over, or ask for permission (in case it is urgent).

Such behaviour derails the entire thought process and breaks the rhythm.

It's just beyond me. How difficult it can be!!!

Web Devs - How many projects do you typically work on at once? I am currently developing 24 websites at once, most of them custom (homepage). I just feel like that is absurd and my company is absolutely insane. Not to mention I'm the front line for client communication as well, pretty much the project manager AND developer. We're a huge company too, not a start up. Just feel like not having project managers for web dev industry is unprecedented except for freelance. 😡👎🏼

after publishing a few apps, building some websites, developing some basic operating systems, participating in a summer learning program at google and having got a job managing the computer science department’s website, today i start my intro to computer science class.

god i hate python

We work with about 7 developers at this company with 80 somewhat websites in production.

We edit changes directly trough FTP and we use ctrl+z as version control...

(yes since i started working here I've been demanding git, I'm spearheading it and we are getting there slowly)

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

The company I am currently working for is partnering with another startup. Nothing special about that. We should integrate their API into our system. I wasn't involved in the process when it came to checking there API and if it would work with our Systems. The Person who did that already left the company so I was left behind with some internal documentation. In that Documentation is already written that API is basically trash....

After I started integrating the API I found more and more flaws in the design. They are not sending any responses that would help, when a param is missing or the authentication isn't correct, only 500's . I got some documentation from the partner company so i thought it will be fine as long as the Documentation would be accurate. Turns out the documentation isn't even close to be up to date. Wrong content types wrong endpoints, wrong naming. Basically we could not work with that. We shortly contacted the partner Company. After a few WEEKS we got a response that they updated the Documentation what was right but still not everything was correct. At this point I lost my mind. I researched a little bit about them, the company is founded from 2 young people who basically came strait out of the University and doest have any experience or idea how to build an API. I investigated a little bit there websites.

They have an Admin panel on the base domain from their API but it is only accessible via HTTP. Like WTF , They use HTTP for an Admin Panel this must be a joke right?

They use Cloudflare without a HTTP to HTTPS redirection ???

I really had not that much time to research in there website but if I find these things in 5 minutes I don't want to know what I can find in like an hour.

At the end we will still use them as partners because surprise surprise our company already sold the product that uses their API.

I know that I will be the person who has to help fixing this shit when it breaks and it will break 1000% JUST FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE PARTNER COMPANY. FUCK THERE API.

Wish me luck. I HAVE to launch 10 websites (yes, ten) this week and half if not all of the clients don't know their DNS accounts or log ins. I foresee a lot of long nights in my near future. Story of our life, right?

Websites with a very bright background and very dark text make me psychopathic. Specially when I'm tired and moody.

Why can't everything have a dark theme and a not-super bright text?

Following on from yesterday's catastrophe...
It happened again overnight!
And THEN another server failed when backing up the DBs...turns out 2 websites have activated logging .. each of around 20GB in the database!

So this morning both of our servers are down for different but similar reasons.

It's absolutely fine everybody.
I'm fine,
we're fine,
it's FINE!

Linkedin/Jura/Monster/[other job finding websites] should add a feature:
A button that reads "lying mofo or dumbass" on each job ad.

For those employers and recruiters who don't understand that neither a senior role nor any role that requires a PhD is classified as an "entry level".

Unfortunately there are so many such dumbfucks I can't blacklist all of them from my job search. 🤬

Apple: this AppleID has been locked for security reasons.
User: Sign Out
Apple: Enter the Apple ID password to turn off Find My iPhone.
User: Turn Off
Apple: You must enter both your Apple ID and password.
User: OK

Apple, please stop bugging me, all I need is to test my websites on Safari occasionally because some customers prefer to use iPhone. Just don't bother me with your Apple ID crap

I’m already irritated by all the unwanted stimulus. I don’t need search engines, websites or whatever that fuck showing me stuff I did not ask for. It’s really distracting and makes it hard to focus on one thing. I’m trying to adjust to a lifestyle like this but it’s bloody difficult in this day and age.

PM: To achieve this, do A
Me: That's unnecessarily complex, can't we do B
PM: Ooh, so it's too complicated for you?
Me: No, it's complex, it will bottleneck the system
PM: We've done A in 5 different websites, so you should do the same
Me: ......

House search has never been as painful as 2021. Not only the websites are shit at stopping agencies from outright lying on their websites, but also they can't even give you a quicker browsing experience. All the click click clicks just to view one fucking option. Duplicate advertises, photos from "a similar apartment", no 3D showing, no blueprints, etc. , and all in all, awful experience all around that nobody cares to fix. 😒

I want to write something in PHP.

Yes, coming from me, it sounds like stockholm syndrome, but for me PHP is reminiscent of simpler times.

I want to get a server right where I bought the domain, with CPanel, log in with FTP and ~~push~~ (excuse me, _send_) index.php and other files there. I want to open phpmyadmin and throw some stupid fields together that won't work at scale, but "scale" will never happen.

I want to design websites without normalize.css, without any kind of javascript but some silly UI stuff, I want to send emails with sendmail and not sendgrid. I want my gradient buttons back.

Symphony and Laravel can kiss my ass.

I hate fucking websites like these. These people should suffer for eternity

I FUCKING HATE IT WHEN I HAVE TO BUILD SOMETHING FROM SOURCE!!!!

So I wanted to install a package with pip. Shouldn't be that difficult, right? RIGHT? Lmao
Things I encountered on this adventure in no particular order:
- multiple undocumented dependencies, only explained on stackoverflow or some github issues
- inconsistent and outdated documentation spread over multiple pages on multiple websites
- Python version can't be too old or too new
- other external software version incompatibilities
- Build process that takes several minutes just to fail, then try again and fail with exactly the same outcome after a few minutes
- fucking SVN is needed?!?!?!
- VS Code is needed for completely manual build ????
- cmd/powershell incompatibilites
- required reboots

At some point I just gave up... Now I don't even remember what I crap I installed that I don't need anymore.
Please for the love of god provide prebuild packages or at least a very SIMPLE build process -_-

I develop websites for car dealerships..

Client: "I love the site, but it needs more sparkles.. to class it up"
Me: facepalm

I've gotten used to working in private mode/incognito since all the websites ask for permissions they don't need.

Serves them right.

They can ask those same questions and save preferences for hundreds of people who are just me. 😛

Oh great, now garbage websites can even break the browser's reload button. Wanna reload the page that never stops loading or crashes its scripts? Click the button and watch the browser do fuck all and a little bit of nothing.

Nah, you see to refresh that polished rotten turd you gotta close the tab and then restore it, and if that doesn't work open a new one and copy-paste the URL because who the fuck doesn't like some invalid state.

Can't wait for the day I have to shutdown and disconnect the battery because some idiot messed up the layout.

Up until now I was using just Linkedin. Can you share some other useful websites where you managed to land some remote jobs in Europe and USA?

I am all burned out on everything having to do with websites. I need a new career path. I’ve never been a stellar programmer. I have no idea what to switch to that I could be good at and that comes with a paycheck and benefits to provide for a family of six. Feeling painted into a corner with no way out.

I’ve never bothered to try Linux as past experiences with it is not as amazing as people say. What advantages does Linux have to Windows? And it terms of real life usage, such as developing software or websites for a local company, why choose Linux over Windows when the majority of the companies users would use Windows anyway?

All I can think is that I should have a computer specifically for Linux so I can still test things on a Windows computer.

Usually websites:
- wrong password -> Password field cleared and focused again

Apple websites:
- wrong password -> Password field cleared and email field focused again and password field hidden because fuck you!

Person 1 to me: Website C needs this update.

Me: I don’t maintain that site. I only maintain websites A and B. I don’t know who does maintenance for your site.

Person 2 to me: Website D needs this update.

Me: I only maintain websites A and B.

Person 3 to me: Website E needs this update.

Aaaahhhhh 😫😡

I deployed one of our staging websites to a free plan because the site is rarely used. Project Manager sends the stakeholders the new url. There will be a lot of 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️🤦 all around. Some of it’s my fault. A lot of it is just WTF.

Stakeholder: We still need the staging site because we don’t want to test in the live site…

PM: Okay. We didn’t say we were deleting the site. We are just moving it to a new and better hosting platform, so we’re letting you know the url has changed.

Stakeholder: This url is for the front facing page. How do I access the backend? [they mean the admin interface]

Me: The only thing that’s changed is the url for the staging website. So domain-A/account is now domain-B/account.

I thought that was a pretty straightforward way of explaining things, that even a non technical person would get it. They took the /account example as the literal login url.

Stakeholder: I forgot the password for our admin login and I submitted a password reset, but I realize I don’t know if I have access to the admin email. Or if it’s even a real email account.

WTF

I look back at the email chain and I realize that I gave the PM the wrong url.

Also, WTF x 2. How did this stakeholder not realize they were looking at the wrong website?? There are definitely noticeable style and content differences. And why would you have an admin login that uses a fake email??

Me: My apologies. I sent over the incorrect url. My instructions are mostly the same. All that’s changed is the domain.

Stakeholder’s assistant: [DMs me] How do we access the backend?

WTF…are they seriously playing this game and demanding I type out the url for them?! 🤬 I’m not playing this game and I just copy and paste the example that I already sent over.

They figure it out eventually. Apparently, they never used /account to login before They used /admin/index… but that would still bring them to /account, but with ?redirect=/admin/index appended to the url if they weren’t logged in. Again, WTF.

I know I made mistakes in this whole thing, but damn. I can’t even. I’m pretty sure this whole incident is fueling my boss’s push to stop supporting this particular website anymore so I can focus on sites that actually bring in revenue…and have stakeholders that aren’t looney and condescending like this.

The popups on websites pisses me off.

If you try to google something quickly and enter various websites you have to close all popups on each site you enter.

Some websites try to make these popups more discreet by making them small and putting them at the bottom of the screen but then your brain just ignore them and focus on the small content above them.

In the year of 2022 people visit a lot of sites during a day. The human brain is programmed to put in as little work as possible to reach a certain goal so therefor everyone ignores popups.

I know its a law to inform people about cookies etc. But isnt there a better way?

"Most electronics work better while turned *on*. The rest are made by HP"

Fucking printer will not only *not* print my stuff but will also make hellish noises, print the same "hello world!" page six times in a row, jam paper in the seventh and spit expensive ink on its own mechanism while there is not even paper in it.
Fucking outdated cellulose-based bureaucracy. Govt' websites are far from perfect but yet are closer to it than presenting fucking tree-meat slabs unecessary covered in colourful liquid gold.

I hate how React is used almost everywhere nowadays. Especially when single-page applications are used for purposes that don't actually benefit from them.

Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but I want websites to work even with client-side JS disabled. At least sites like Amazon don't rely on it, and work just fine. Progressive enhancement is the way to go.

Small chaotic startup that never grew up (15 years atm).
Hosts/maintains a number of apps/sites for various customers.

At some point, someone decides that a CMS would be usefull to maintain the content across all products. Forgoing all sense, reason and the very notion of "additional maintenance and dev" it is decided that one should be built in-house.

Fast forward a number of years.

Ops performs routine maintenance on prod-servers. A java-patch accidently knocks out one of the pillars a 3rd party lib the CMS uses for storing images. CMS basically burst in to flames causing a.... significant incident.

Enter yours truly to fix the mess.
Spend a few days replacing the affected 3rd party lib. Run tests on CMS in test and staging environments. Apply java-patch. All seems fine.

When speaking to frontenders and app-devs, a significant hurdle present itself:
All test/staging instances of all websites/apps/etc ALL USE PRODUCTION CMS. Hardcoded. No way around.

There is -no- way to properly test and verify the functionality of any changes made to the home-brewed CMS.
My patch did indeed work in the end.

But did the company learn anything? Did they listen to my reasoning, pleading or even anguished screams for sanity?

No.

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.

Where to start...
1) them initially expecting us to do 15+ custom websites at once while also doing the Project Management work (including all client communication) for all projects, for $33k a year....
2) Having to pull teeth to get a feeble raise
3) Rude clients

German public service digitization. Websites celebrating the new "digital functionality" of the federal ID card, but if you need to prolong the actual card, you have to visit a public administration center in person, no way to prove your existing valid ID in a zoom meeting although that's de-facto standard accepted even when opening a bank account, plus they have all of my data so they should know I have a valid ID and they could just send the new one to my postal address.
So I have to appear in person at their offices, so I need an appointment, but in times of covid pandemic, appointments are rare and only offered on a day-to-day basis in my hometown, that's why I have to visit their online appointment web app at 7 a.m. in the morning to grab one of the few appointments when they are released.
Don't tempt me to write a script that squats all the other appointment slots to resell at the highest prices...

Situation reminds of the times when it was even harder to get a vaccination against covid, and the media kept reporting about the minority that refused to get vaxxed, so they didn't have to admit there wasn't enough vaccine anyway.

This rant is not about politics, it's about the failure of bureaucracy, but if it was about politics, I would just quote Rezo that it shows who had governed this state for sixteen years.

When I rant about German internet connectivity, people usually reply that the web is much better in Taipeh, Bangalore or Guadalajara, so I can still have some hope that it's not all of the world that's totally lost.

So give me some hope, folks.

I maintain two websites for my employer. The head of my department and my manager decided it’s best for me to focus my time on website A and website B should be replatformed to an out of the box solution. For website B, we’d work with our IT team to find something suitable.

I did some research and came up with a list of possible solutions. IT looked into solutions that would work with the org’s best practices for tech. A few sales pitches and demos were arranged with the top choices.

Stakeholder for website B is really digging in her heels. SH keeps badgering our Product Manager and IT about why can’t we just build in-house. The out of box solutions don’t do everything she wants.

PM tells SH that no solution will be perfect. PM also reminds SH that comparable institutions just use Google sheets/forms and do everything by hand. So choose an out of the box platform or use Google forms.

Plus, the list of improvements the SH wanted for website B would take at least a year if I did them on my own and there’s no budget to out source the labor. That’s not counting bring the code up to best practices or improving database efficiency.

I’m glad I don’t have to work with Stakeholder anymore. SH and her department were just a pain. They want a lot of custom tech solutions but they freak out at the smallest talk about tech issues.

My best and worst dev experience this year was getting a new job.

The bad parts: I’m inheriting a code base that was maintained by an outside agency, so there’s very little documentation. There’s a lot of systems maintenance and upgrades that have to be done because it was never done. I’m working at a larger organization, so tracking down who I need for info can be tricky. I’m the only person maintaining my code base.

Now the good parts: Better pay and benefits. My co workers, dev and non-dev, are always helpful. Since the dev team is small, we are very discerning when we pick up work for the websites. I have more independence to self-learn. I’m not at a blame culture. My role is permanently remote.

So far I think the good outweighs the bad.

Things nobody told you when starting to learn a new programming language:

Congratulations! You became a collector. From now on you will collect websites, books and a ton of related software.

Looking at vacancies and the JS build tools asked (Babel, Gulp) and then visiting their websites I notice that I don't understand what they are going on about.

"Leverage gulp and the flexibility of JavaScript to automate slow, repetitive workflows and compose them into efficient build pipelines."

What the actual corpo fuck?

The "get started" page expects you already know npm, typescript, and when you look at their pages, well... Where does the circlejerk end and the actual Javascript start?

I've been out of the corporate loop for a few years, seems it's all about build tools these days. I need to get out of this industry pronto.

Ideal dev job would be to work on pretty/girly fashion or cosmetics websites, have drama free and knowledgeable co-workers, decent salary, great organization, external training opportunities, cute modern office, dogs, cats and a cafe on site, a dope recharge room & no talking to clients ever.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

Why why do people bother making so many lazy Stackoverflow spinoffs? Who would ever want to read that garbage low effort websites?

Just an idea...

Fuck scam calls and texts. I feel like wrapping their phone cords around their necks and beating them with the handset.

So short story long, I'm looking at developing a website that has a list of websites and endpoints for text and call subscriptions. The stupider the better. Enter the annoying phone number or email address, subscribe them to every damn service on the list, and let the fun begin.

Has anyone got any such websites they'd like included?

The it manager said that the site on my private vps where we are using a small tool as reference, is a security issue and what if it may be hacked... Well, from this point of perspective all the websites shall be switched off. The tool lovered the problem resolution from 30 to 2 minutes.. I have asked for on premise server before but noone gave a shit so I hosted on my private vps. I wont give it back for free, its a sure thing. Soon they will start to get the complains that its offline because the customer is using it for debugging too. I feel like IT and dev is really moving appart. They act as bunch of pathetic jelous guys who couldn't learn programming and ended up in installing windows on machines...

How do other developers handle local websites that are large in size? Currently the code and site need to be setup for each client for several developers. We use github and bitbucket repos for the code.

The biggest issue is downloading the site files and setting it up locally for each developer. We used Docker for some projects but ran into permission issues and storage space became an issue.

i am currently learning react and i find it easier to convert vanilla html css websites into react than writing a website in react from scratch. while writing a website, i am now accustomed to writing mobile first flex based css that looks nice , and handles most of the animation, show hide based stuff by classes. whereas in react if i start thinking about how states and context are going to work with it, i end up going bacl to the imported css to get it to look nice at first

I have my own sole proprietorship and hate it. I am in an area that a ton of businesses need new websites. Their existing ones look like they were made in the 90's. I go in, have a seemingly great meeting. We talk about goals and looks. It ends with "send me something and I will have my IT guy look at it". Your IT guy...in a business with 2 employees. Then a few months later, they have a new website. Looks like it was made in 2002.

stateofjs survey reminds me of all that's wrong with JavaScript: too many frameworks each of which has to reinvent the wheel and depend on too many node_modules child dependencies, most don't support TypeScript properly (ever tried to convert a node-express-mongoose tutorial to TS?), there is still no proper type support in JS core language, and browser features get added in form of overly complex APIs instead of handy DOM methods.

Instead the community gets excited about micro-improvements like optional chaining which has been possible in other languages for decades.

At least there is something like TypeScript, but I don't like its syntax either, it's overly verbose and adds too much "Java feeling" to JavaScript in my opinion.

Also there is too much JS in web development, as CSS and HTML seem to have missed adding enough native functionality that works reliable cross browser to build websites in a descriptive way without misunderstanding web dev for application engineering.

After all, I'd rather have frontend PHP than more JavaScript everywhere.

Anyway, at least the survey has the option to choose how satisfied or unsatisfied people are about certain aspects of JS. But I already suspect that most respondents will seem to be very happy and eager to learn the latest hype train frameworks or stick to their beloved React in the future.

ant.design selectors are bogus garbage.

The drop-down selector that replaces the browser's native one does not allow typing to select an entry, meaning to select a language from a long list, one needs to manually scroll to it. If the scroll wheel of the mouse does not work properly, one needs to use the scroll bar, which is far too short to be able to conveniently scroll a long language list.

Sure, ant.design might look pretty (as advertised), and has oh-so-fancy features like fade in/out animations, but from an interaction point of view, that's as useless as the skeleton screens popularly used by JavaScript-based websites (which are anyway inferior in performance and compatibility compared to static HTML pages with JavaScript on top).

Not only can I not type-to-select, but the date selector on Dailymotion, which uses this utter garbage, sends "[object Object]" to the server, so the user is forced to edit the HTTP request manually. Complete utter garbage.

Don't use that shit. Use the browser's native feature. Or use something progressively enhancing like the drop-down menus used by MediaWiki on pages such as Special:Contributions, where it actually is properly implemented.

If your platform doesn’t target websites, just server-server or server-mobile; you’re better off with gRPC. Assuming there’s no learning overhead, of course.

What's the general Software Engineering rule of thumb again for frontend templating code?

If I look at certain websites, I notice some code smells in PHP such as:
$.modal = <?php echo $(base)["username"] != 'me' ?' ': echo 'style="display=none"' ?>

or just in general places in the code where PHP gets used as a templating engine for gluing together pieces of HTML code based on conditionals spread out over the codebase and the database itself too. To make things worse, this carries over to JavaScript ajax functions. As a developer, this to me just seems like spaghetticode.

On the other hand, many popular frameworks properly do templating, such as EJS, containing templating in one place and not mixing it with logic too much but just having simple output like <%= %>.

I know I've seen frameworks like Angular 1 contain pieces of HTML into directives, but maybe that's something different, more 'OO'-simulating or cleaner.

Guess what most loved CMS now has 43% market share for websites?

I hate AudioContext. Visitors might like it since it does not permit websites to blast loud sounds. However, as a developer, I hate it. Before AudioContext existed everything was cool. Suddenly it appeared from nowhere. I had no clue that Chrome added it. Now my websites aren't as exciting at first glance anymore.

I’m a full stack developer, working with React. Also before this I used to be an OK hobby artist (for sketching and painting, that is), but man I SUCK at designing websites!! I don’t have that designer’s mind at all. At work that’s not an issue because we have guidelines and such, but when I’m doing free time projects it always looks so ugly and amateurish.

How can I improve, should I take some graphic design course, or is there some specific buzz word for graphic design on the web that I should look out for? How can I learn standards of margins, buttons, text and such in a good way. Some people just seem to have it in them already!

Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated!

Has anyone moved their email from gmail to outlook / outlook to gmail? Like everything from contacts, calendar, signed up apps and websites

At work I have to multitask on way too many projects and to make it worse there is a lot of red tape and I have to waste a lot of time surfing buggy documentation websites, switching VPNs and praying for CI/CD to work rather than writing code in the fucking editor and for me repetitive tasks and context switching are productivity killers since they prevent me to enter in a state of flow and I keep daydreaming or distracting myself.

I have a billion projects that i want to host online. Does anyone have a good tutorial for hosting python projects, flask based web-apps, and just simple websites using aws or some other hosting service?

Has anyone used advertising agencies like admob, AdSense etc in their websites or apps and anyone have great success stories to share with them? I get it "depends on the app or website" but I wanna know if anyone has managed to get a decent amount of monthly earnings from it.