Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN
I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳
We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;
JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).
HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).
There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.
No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.
You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.
Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!
Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!
Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.
...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!22 -
I feel like a wild west cowboy drawing his revolver at laser speeds when I press ctrl + s microseconds before alt + tabbing and refreshing the page with F5.8
-
Current task:
Somehow, one of my predecessors made some sort of custom hook tied to woocommerce check out that pipes some data into a nightmarish spaghetti fuck pile of undocumented wild west visual basic bullshit. It does this, presumably, via a set of parameters passed as plaintext in a url. I know this because I found the singleton that declares this. Helpfully, Mr. Fuckass named the class "Default", so I only have around 30k instances being kicked back by my IDE when I search for it. The only reason I "need" to find this, is so that I can just change the button to an href pointing at my own MS for shipping, and I need to change the fifteen params being passed to just one - a customer ID, which should be stored in the session, and referenced by a cookie. Once that is done, I should be able to freely delete a couple of gigs worth of bullshit. Been stuck on this for three days now. God forbid we have a test environment or something.
I'm tired. Can't even get angry anymore really. Can't even think of anything funny to say about it either, I just can't wait until this is done and I can go back to sleep.4 -
Maybe in special dedication to @kiki.
I cut the unit tests down in LOC size by roughly 50 - 60 % in most projects.
It's really easy once one sees unit tests not as a dunking pile of copy pasta wild west, but rather as a code base that needs architecture and design.
Some extensions, some annotations, some good old helper classes.
Pooooof.
Why I did this? ...
Because it's fucking annoying when you read a PR with tests and need a fucking diff tool to spot the difference between two tests cause they're 80 % the same.
Yeah. Thx for giving me brain cramps, motherducker.
I'm not an expert in unit tests, but if all test codebases look like the "usual stuff" in our projects...
It's no wonder bugs exist...10 -
It's interesting to me... a lot of the rants I see here are all like "just started this new job and this place is SO fucked". Talking about how there's no process, no source control, terrible code, etc.
I say it's interesting because most of the time the thought that goes through my head is "that sounds fun as hell!"
Like, spend as many years at a place as I have, a place where there's SO much process and SO many controls and all of that... you know, the whole "big enterprise" mindset... and the idea of being able to come in to a place that's kind of wild west and actually work to FIX the place, to have freedom to change direction and innovate and not be locked in to all sorts of rules, is kind of exciting.
(you know, assuming it's a place and a position where that's possible at all... but at this point in my career, I'd only take a position where I had that kind of authority from the start, and as long as I have the authority then I'm happy to take on the responsibility and I'm up for the challenge)8 -
Coming from the wild west (ie. being freelance) to a fairly large organisation it's comforting to learn that they only have a *slightly* more organised work flow than I did when I was on my own.
It seems they're only human too, after all! 😃5 -
The switch from “Wild West” to ITIL uncovered so much bull crap. 20% of the people where doing 80% of the work. And then people were keeping some things alive by shear will, once Changes and Service Requests were required, it was shown how awful the environment truly was and how few people in the company knew how anything worked.
-
I've been sort of lost after New Year's...
Last few years, my main goal was just to learn stuff to pass technical interviews. I also did a lot of personal dev in C#... and played with the js, python, and when a bit of c++.
But this year I kinda feel sorta of "ah screw it". Interviews never work out, haven't for years, what's the point in even trying... I get paid enough though the work is sort boring and team sort of feels like the Wild West, no rules, code reviews, processes...
But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Feels like coding has lost its place at the top now. The future is all cloud, machine learning, big data/real time analytics but feels like these are out of reach for just 1 guy...
And well doesn't seem like anyone is going to give me a job because I'm not a good fit or have enough experience in these areas...
Sorta lost now but guess this is what a sudden thought leads to...
Oh and maybe just with tech in general. It feels this year I'm just not as interested as I was before... Spent a lot of time binge watching movies and stuff instead....4 -
Job descriptions are only accurate for about a few months after that its the wild west whatever they want you to do.5
-
The Javascript build/bundling eco system is killing me every time I try to get into it.
Me: oh vite, a nice and fast bundle that supports hmr
Me: works like a charm
Well until I discovered that exporting a self contained bundle with Inlined dependencies is not a thing and you have to pray that your framework provides such plugins
The world of js/jsx/tsx bundling, building, tree shaking, transpiling, Inlining, transforming is such a wild west and that on top of an already very unstable layer of different frameworks that work so fundamentally different that you cannot apply a single principle to even 2 of then (from a building/ssr/bundling perspective)
Standards signing off when it comes to building node apps11 -
My app is finally on the Apple App Store.
The rant: how bloody difficult was it to get on there?! They scrutinise EVERYTHING. My promo copy, my screengrabs and also it seems that there is code that works on iPhone that doesn’t work on iPad.
I thought it was designed to be the same for ease of development? However I found a function that works perfectly well on iPhone but breaks iPad.
Anyway I guess in the long run this keeps the App Store’s quality level high and it isn’t the Wild West like the google play store. However it’s still pretty annoying. I can see why devs get angry about Apple’s process.2 -
switching from C# / managed C++ to pure C++ in the new project feels like being relocated to an outpost in the wild west.
now i have to think about so many things the C# compiler would just have cared for, and all this hassle before i can actually address the problems that i want to solve. already ran into some weird memory overflows. i'm actually happy to learn something new, but it still feels really inefficient.3 -
Typo3.
Especially when it comes to debugging third party (usually outsourced) plugins and implantations..
It's daz vile wild west over there, you never know where something is defined, but more often that not, some obscure TypoScript file.
Never have i been so grateful for xdebug & grep / awk combined with regular expressions.. -
Been going through the family stash of old Wild West type novels (you know, cowboys and cattle drives and six shooters and gunmen and rivalries and all), from authors like Louis L'Amour, JT Edson, and Oliver Strange. Because Texas appears so frequently in these books, in my mind's eye the protagonist often looks suspiciously like AleCx04's avatar with a hat and gun rig. And horse, of course. And speaks like McCree from Overwatch.
*shrug*2 -
How nothing in our ever changing workflow is ever documented, we’re just out in the wild Wild West figuring it out as we go.
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View