"Please integrate the Facebook Conversion API into our website".

Is that enough information for a dev to act on? I've been reading up on how FB's Conversion API works but the more I read the less I understand what my clients wants. Or what I am supposed to do.

How do you deal with clients that send you a link to implement some shit from Facebook for which you need to log into Facebook?

I don't have access to the company account and I'm not sharing my personal data with Meta, so most of the time I run into a login wall.

Laravel, Symfony...

It doesn't seem to matter what framework I pick to learn next. I rarely get past the Installation step where I have to install and learn a bunch of command line tools first.

It makes me realize I no longer want to be a web developer as even the biggest step I can reasonably make in my career will still not result in an income change significant enough to pay for a mortgage, and the smallest step still expects me to understand all of these command line tools for seemingly no payoff whatsoever.

I feel stuck and depressed looking at all the toxic positivity on LinkedIn. I cannot fathom the amount of indoctrination that must be going on between all these people chirping about how great it is to work for their company.

The website was down.

She called me 5 or 6 times and mailed me twice that amount, asking how long it would take to get back up. Each time I answered that I did not know, that it was my job to figure out what was wrong, and that solving a problem doesn't have a fixed duration.

What I thought was that the updates on her emotional state of regret were not helping me to resolve the issue and cost me time. Why do people inflate the price of things they are going to pay for by asking for what cannot be known?

In the end it was just a shitty shared host having flipped some switches. It was their own damn fault for picking it over our recommended provider that keeps us informed about all them switches. Such as disallowing SymLinks overnight.

I'm learning how to bundle with webpack. Cool. Exept that I don't have a single project in my portfolio that would benefit from any of it's features. Is this another "enterprise only" thing I can easily ignore in favor for the few <script> tags I'd normally use to hook up VUE or whatever?

Client wants some CMS text to be automatically translated. So I checked and Google seems to have a solution for that. I thought to to be as simpel as doing a request and parsing the response. That's how API's work, right?

No. First I must create an account, that account must have a credit card, then I need to setup credentials, the default ones working with path variables, an API key... etc etc etc.

I feel so stupid for just not understanding their docs. I'm just a dude that installs a CMS and makes pretty CSS for it. I've worked with REST APIs before (Mollie, Carerix) but none of them ever demanded the level of knowledge and setup the Google Translate API demands.

Am I just a bad developer or is this shit just too complex for your average web developer?

So when will DevRant stop taking over my fucking scrollbar in Chrome?

Is an art director/manager that makes designs for an existing website expected to brief the developer on how he wants his new designs to work? Or is the developer expected to innately understand what his functional desire is from the design itself?

My art director/manager claims that he shouldn't have to log into the backend to see how things relate to one another, and that his designs alone should imply what is intended.

When some design element overlaps an existing image gallery, am I expected to magically know whether this element is singular or partaining to the current image shown?

I want to know whether or not me getting mad at him for not telling me how he wants stuff to work is valid, and whether or not I should demand that he briefs me how his design relate to existing taxonomy.

Am I the bad guy?

I was today years old when I created my first node.js Hello World app. I managed to add some basic routing with express.js, managed to read a mysql table and some JSON. I'm starting to 'get' the node.js environment. Shows you're never too old to learn something new.

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.

I just don't know what to say to a new employer anymore. I'm almost 40 years old and have not worked a day VOLUNTARILY in my life. I strictly do it because I must. To prolong a life I never asked for. Yesterday someone at worked joked I must be
weary of life. Yeah. I openly admitted that I am.

Devrant, can you recommend me a good IDE for PHP/Javascript/HTML that is not NetBeans? It decided to become unusable overnight and I need a backup IDE so I can keep working.

What is more preferable stress?

Hacking around the bleeding edge or maintaining old boring crap?

Why is there such a huge disconnect between the way people talk about work on LinkedIn and what it actually entails? All jobs come down to selling your time to stave off homelessness and hunger, and they all pretend there is something enjoyable in it, even for the lowest paid people. Salaries no longer buy us housing anyway. There is no point in any of this anymore apart from pure survival. Why do these idiots pretend their job is somehow different? It's not.

SMM: Can you chat over the phone? Just want to make sure we are on the same page! I am not great with web lingo!

Me: Sure.

Me, internally: You're a social media manager. That's literally your one fucking job.

Client: Can you add the link to our Pinterest to our website?

Me, internally: Did you just ask a webdeveloper if he could add a link? No wonder you're too dumb to add the link to your Pinterest via your CMS, where the inputfield is waiting for input.

Me, externally: Yes. Could you send me the link please?

Yay! I got my head wrapped around Vue3 parent / child components and fed the whole thing JSON data loaded via Axios. A small feat perhaps, but it just feels great to still "get" stuff when learning becomes harder as I get older.

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."

Scrolling on devRant (browser) is still borked. Whenever I try to scroll down, some script counters my every move. Has been the case for months. Am I the only one experiencing this?

Recruiter starts his mail with a question. "Are you really harcore?"

And I think to myself...

"No. I'm really exhausted."

So you are telling me I have to stay indoors from 21:00 onward because of Corona virus? And get a 95 euro fine when I don't? While I'm working 8 hours a day in a small office with 3 old fucks that refused to do ANY protection for their employees?

I'm glad you old fucks are dropping like flies. 2 million of you are dead already. Hurry up and die faster!!!

They want me to change a few details in the CSS in a wordpress website. The theme supports some extra CSS. However, it doesn't seem to work without !important.

Turns out there's a line of CSS dumped in the <head> directly that overrides all "extra" CSS... and about 9 <link> instances after that... oh and some random <style> tags after that...

Oh and rounding shouldn't be done with CSS but with some custom button style editor. For each button. Seperately. Because fuck my life.

Manager 1: "We're going to hold a small meeting because of a new project."

Me: "Okay, cool. What project is it about?"

Manager 1: "Project X".

ME: "Right. What's the domain name?"

Manager 2: "Well there's this design but it's entirely made up. Just a concept."

Manager 1: "Wait, there's no more toner."

Manager 1 and 2 take 20 minutes to fix the printer, so manager 1 can print out an e-mail. They both return to their seats. No meeting happens. I roll a smoke and go outside to flip through LinkedIn for the nth time this week.

1000 lines of css is still smaller then most images optimized for modern displays (aka everything that isn't a thumbnail). Either our designers don't come up with stuff complex enough to validate adding a compilation step to interpreted code or I'm missing something,

I've been looking into CSS preprocessors. Can anyone give me an example of why you'd use one that isn't some lame programming platitude like "pushing technology forward"? Like an actual design element that can't be done in straight up CSS?

As someone who compiled AS3 for the web back in the day the "new wave" of internet technology (with all it's compilation steps) seems super dodgy.

Yuppie clients are utter cancer. You treat me like garbage, stress me the fuck out with constant calls and changes, and force me to deploy manually on a f*cking friday. Your site deserves to be broken. You deserve to be angry. I enjoy your business suffering, you yuppie ass money brabbing retardotron.

After two months of NPM hell I have made the decision to stop trying to catch up to this Javascript insanity.

The salary I would make if I understood this shit is not worth my sanity. Most people develop a career, but all I seem to develop is RSI and a seething hatred for humanity.

DEAR FRONTEND CLIENTS

STOP ASKING ME TO DO THE GEOMETRICALLY IMPOSSIBLE

YOU PASSED FIRST GRADE YOU SHOULD KNOW HOW SHAPES WORK

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

What's up with the scrolling on Devrant? Or rather, the lack thereof. I keep being sent back to the top of the page.

I just implemented the cookie popup you wanted me to make. And now you give me a call that your tracking code doesn't appear in the source code?

Oh, but you don't see the cookie popup? You saw it right? So you've already set your cookie permissions, probably not to accept tracking cookies. We can check by... what's that?

If I can make the tracking code appear anyway?

...

Yeah, sure, no problem, change will be live in five minutes.

I loved what Flash used to be. Most people thought it was proprietary stuff. The program was. It's language was not. And damn, did we have fun together! We rendered vector graphics from code and pushed perlin noise into bitmaps while the HTML guys were still struggling with rounded corners. Oh, those bezier curves we dreamed up out of thin lines of code!

Other people just couldn't see how beautiful you were. They hated you because you were popular, and ads were beginning to dominate the landscape. And lots of dildo's made ads by abusing your capabilities, straining you with their ugly code that didn't remove event listeners properly. I always did, because I loved you.

They made fun of you because you had to be compiled. Look what those cavemen are doing now, dear ActionScript 3.0. They are compiling Javascript and pushing it to production. They are all fools my dear, unworthy to read even a single line of your gracious typed syntax. We were faster then Java. More animated and fluid then CSS. We were even responsive if we needed to.

But... I have to move on. I don't know if you're still watching over me but I can't deny I've been trying to find some happiness. I think you would have wanted me to. C# is a sweet girl and I'm thankful for her, but I won't ever forget those short few years we had together. They were the absolute best.

Rest well my dear princess.