internet connection "speed" in Germany might be the reason why so many people still queuing up on the roads on their way to an office despite being allowed to work from home at least in theory

Dev goals for 2022? Best and worst DX in the past?

Wish to prioritize customers with useful business goals who are open to sustainable web dev, usability and accessibility.
Want to use even more CSS and find a way to use new features like parent selectors without sacrificing compatibility.

Continue learning and using Symfony, but also continue with my full-stack side project using JS or even better TypeScript for the backend also for the backend.

Best developer experience: getting new customers for my own business after leaving a company last winter.

Worst developer experiences:

Corporate customers with large budgets and design agencies seem to fancy all the antipatterns I thought bad and obsolete, like carousel content, animations everywhere, and autoplay videos on the home page. Poorly written, poorly thought, and sometimes contradictory, requirements. Customers and agencies changing their mind halfway through a project.

"Agile" daily meetings, not giving devops necessary repository permissions, and making Webpack mandatory for no real reason.

Another first world mimimi but still an obstacle when just wanting to get work done quickly. I don't know what's more annoying: the multi-line pasted styles that used to be useful one-liners, or the fact that the top search result for this issue was closed/locked without even linking to the appropriate Chromium bugreport?! People report that's fixed, but the fix did not land in Vivaldi yet. Maybe I should consider using Firefox as my default browser again.

Why does Google have to buy big billboard ads at the bus stops to convince people to use Google search?

Did Google finally realize that despite being the best search engine, many of their results are still pretty shitty?

Or do they merely want to distract from the anti-FAANG (don't) be evil discussion?

"This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers." (not my question, but by a newbie who, for some reason I will never find out, tried to use an outdated Ubuntu version)

Seen that bullshit so many times.
If you don't have a minute to ask a question to a new contributor, but you do have the time to downvote or close questions, do you really think you are doing the community a favour?

I see that AskUbuntu is not a little bit better than StackOverflow. I will just shut up and leave the assholes alone then they can tell the newbies that they're not welcome on any StackExchange and that's it.

All that I have been ranting about this year are first world problems. Not only because politics is the only taboo on devrant, but also because I have been making too much compromise again.

It seems that most of the money is paid in projects for industrial companies, marketing, and useless products. So I ended up doing only some work for impact projects and ecological startups, taking time to learn new technology, and otherwise waste my potential to make a change by doing web development for well paying companies.

Still better than the years before, when I was an employee. Corporate culture sucks, at least it seems so at most companies in Germany and probably also America and even more so in other countries?! As a freelancer, at least I have the choice not to agree to any offer. And I did say no to many offers this year.

But still ...

New year resolution: prioritize customers with a purpose to make the world a better place. Make less compromise. Stop complaining about bullshit tech and just get things done instead.

My email address appeared in a new data breach at gravatar. I thought that's exactly gravatar's purpose, to make my email address publicly known and provide an additional profile picture?

dependabot keeps trying to destroy my working code

Now that I have to use Microsoft Teams chat, I don't find Slack that bad anymore. Teams doesn't support threads, source code is poorly formatted without any syntax highlighting, and emojis look shitty.

Maybe it's hard to get CSS calc() right,
but to make it really complicated,
let SASS do its erratic magic on it

What happened to the buttons on top of my smartphone after updating to Android 12?
How did everything get so clunky?
How to turn off the labels and simply display 4 icons in a row like it used to be before?

JavaScript still doesn't have proper types, but eslint insists that I should use let and const instead of var. Thanks for the hint, but when I care to code properly, I will use TypeScript, otherwise I don't care.

Wish the warnings in my editor would be more helpful with less noise by default, without taking time and effort to tune their settings.

git merge "conflicts"

(not really an issue, but still a waste of time and concentration, when every now and then, using more than one branch, small edits, merge, and rebase, git diff complains about "conflicts" that are obvious to solve for a human but still not for a machine, despite the hype about the age of AI, coding co-pilots and the like...)

Hardest thing about software development to me is estimation of time needed to complete. There should be an algorithm that knows to estimate better than me, shouldn't it? Like google maps navigation knows precisely in advance when I will arrive somewhere taking a car or a train, perhaps they could do my development estimates for me?

Trying to configure a smartphone which was already optimized for elderly users, with a more simplistic launcher, larger font size etc.

But the underlying Android 7 and its apps still keep showing up with their inconsistent UI and nagging messages and suggestions.

Is it even possible to configure any Android device to make it really simplistic and distraction free like, say, a classic NOKIA before the age of smartphones?

Culprit no. 1 Google and Android system. Suggestions about features keep recurring, even after stating that we are not interested in the feature.

Culprit no. 2 WhatsApp, unfortunately still the most popular messaging app in Germany, so this crappy bullshit software by Mark Fuckerberg's company has to be installed. Even to me as a tech savy developer, WhatsApp has a confusing user interface that tries to promote features like status (their versions of stories) without any option to hide / turn off.

How shall an 80 year old senior learn to use the app when they previously only used SMS and voice calls? I don't know.

!dev but why can't I use messenger services like WhatsApp or Telegram in the browser without my phone powered and connected? Why are both services still so popular anyway?

Oracle while trying to install their database on Windows 10 (both, at least, only inside a VirtualBox): sorry, but the path containins space character. Which is because either your UI dialog failed to properly escape or your installer failed properly handle a native file path, Oracle! Nevermind totally ignoring the OS's UI style and cropping your own error message in the second line.

Emulating a mobile browser in desktop Chrome does not show any virtual keyboard even when tapping into an input field. Same error in Firefox (and same in Vivaldi).

I thought there had been an emulated soft keyboard in the past, or was that only in Opera mobile emulator?

Is there any browser that runs on Linux that still does a proper mobile emulation?

In legacyCode, somebody mixed jQuery data-toggle with custom JS triggers that toggle the target's DOM node, and to "fix" the mess, set display: block !important.

Took me too long to remember that Firefox dev tools show JS events (while my Chrome dev tools don't - why?) now I'm on the right track towards a solution...

Trying to delete a text field in a WYSIWYG Low-/No-Code Page Builder for WordPress...

"Notice: You cant' save an empty text field." - only Button: "Ok fine!"

Parody? Usability?

What is worse than editing legacy CSS code? Trying to style a page using only no-code / low-code tools. Simplest things like a border only on one side seems nearly impossible or requires hours of trial-and-error with drag-and-drop-modules and their arcane option dialogs.

Google Search Console insists there is "content wider than screen" on a one-pager I did which works very well on all tested sizes and devices, and scores 90+ on Google PageSpeed Insights.

"Validation failed - see details."

Clicked on "see details", and only saw the 1 URL I already knew, which seems to be working fine for everyone. If Google detetcs an actual issue, it would be really helpful to provide some details, otherwise this kind of false-positive crap only serves to care less about their tools (which is a bit of a shame, as they do provide a lot of value most of the time).

I have to make !important fixes to an existing legacy CSS codebase.

Helping to fix legacy code on a staging server. No version control (at least not that I am aware of). Besides rare code comments, no way to see the author, time, or even purpose of customizations that have been made. No fun!

Today on GitHub: this must be the new "autopilot", probably slackbot's brother, suggesting me slightly funny arbitrary repository names.

"Great repository names are short and memorable. Need inspiration? How about shiny-fiesta?"

German bureaucracy, German tax offices, German pension insurance: of course we should feel very lucky and grateful for those institutions but currently, all they do is keep frustrating me with their kafkaesque bureaucracy. Don't they have anything more useful and productive to do than bother me with their bean counting?!

How to make google search results relevant and useful as a user LOL

As a webmail user, I want to be logged out automatically without any reasonable reason, to be able to read your notice that I have forgotten to log out, once I log in again.

fix available via `npm audit fix --force`
^ will actually downgrade packages
wtf

Germany trying to fight Covid with digital tools (at least not another app today): registered for a test with QR-Code, Webform and E-Mail. After being tested by friendly people, I received an email that contains a link to a download of a PDF document.

Inside the PDF, a QR code, and a bureaucratic text like during the time of the Prussian emperor: "Bescheinigung über das Vorliegen eines positiven oder negativen Tests (Antigen Schnelltest) zum Nachweis des SARS-CoV-2 Virus".

Okay, we have a national "Corona Warn App" using Google's bluetooth based distancing detection, that also allows to add a test by scanning a QR code.

Scanned the code, got

"QR code is invalid".

Despite the unfriendly UX writing and the unhelpful description, another proof of the state of digitalization in Germany in 2021.

I am not even surprised.

At least my test result is negative.