I once worked until 8am to get a demo ready for a client of the client. I knew the client was a bit thick, so I made some comprehensive video demos and sent them over to him, to save him trying to demo it himself. I wake up at 11am with him screaming down the phone at me:

“It doesn’t work, none of it works!”

“What do you mean?”

“I go to login and I can’t enter anything.”

“I haven’t sent you anything to log into...wait, are you trying to log into a video? Tell me you’re not trying to log into a video of a login page.”

“Uh...oh hang on, it just worked. Ok no pr-“

“No wait, what do you mean it worked?”

“I logged in fine.”

“It’s a video. You can’t log into a video.”

“Uh...alright, bye mate, thanks!”

The moral of the story is: never assume any level of intelligence on the part of a client, even if they exhibit signs of it at first. If they are paying you they will forget how to tie their own shoelaces.

Leave one TODO untended, six months later...

You get to cast a role in Programming Languages: The Movie. Who, for which, and why?

Obviously, JavaScript is going to be played by Nicolas Cage. It's an insane, hot mess, often used well outside its range, but has an undeniable charm and, given the right role, isn't half bad.

Recruiters spamming on LinkedIn

"Got a great mid-range iOS dev role that I think you'd be ideal for!"

Yeah I'm a CTO and I've done fucking no iOS work ever, I can see why you narrowed it down to me.

"Are you free for a quick call?"

Yeah, I'll just drop what I'm doing and talk to some fucking total stranger, because nothing makes me happier than hiring a dev for 15% more than I'm paying them and the extra going to some bottom-feeding fuck for having emailed a resume.

"Hey, I'm a growth hacker..."

If I have a growth that needs hacking I'll go to an actual doctor, not some shit-wizard with a gross beard.

BLAZING FAST

I never see this said with reference to a fucking hardware driver or a shit hot games engine, it's always used to persuade me to use some fucking frontend framework.

It's JS, running in a browser, polishing the turd of the clapped-out DOM - I don't EXPECT it to be fast. I just don't want it to go completely to fuck straight away. The bar is so low that the core of the Earth is melting it.

Leverage. This is a noun, there is already a verb: lever. If 'levering' something doesn't sound good, well, that's because it's not an appropriate verb for what you are describing. We're better than the Marketing dept, stop wastaging everyone's time.