@GigabyteDX My day job is QA for a company that does Salesforce Commerce Cloud (aka Demandware) implementations. There are definitely sites it's overkill for, but it's rock solid architecture (in 6 years I think I've seen two outages that were actually their fault). If you have enough volume to justify paying their prices, it's a good solution.

@kenpeter So since people are generally happier on Friday you should release code at the end of the day?

You have fun with that.

Through IE9, they had lots of custom attributes and things that were just different because they felt that having unique/different behaviors would force people to code for and use their browser.

They finally gave up in 10, started sticking to the specs better, and gave us what was (for the time) a not horrible set of dev tools. 11 was even (again for the time) mostly standards compliant (though a bit passive aggressive about it--I had one bug where a comment before the doc type declaration threw it into quirks mode because the spec said the DTD absolutely had to be first.)

These days, though, people try to insist we develop for them, even though everything before 11 is end of life. 11 only gets security updates, so it gets harder to work with all the time. I'm pretty sure the only reason 11 is still supported is some contract that requires them to support ActiveX controls through 2022 or whenever they've said EOL is.

Edge, as odd as it is to say it, is not horrible.

@dev0urer Code coverage tools lead to people testing until they get 100% code coverage, which is nothing at all like 100% use case coverage.

Man, character limits sure make me exercise my editing skills.

There are lots of areas where not being a white male has been a disadvantage for a long time, to the extent that it has become ingrained in the culture at large.

We are more aware of that now, and trying to change it. In an ideal world we'd be able to say "really, everyone's welcome, even the blue skinned people who reproduce by budding," or whatever, and everything would be fair, and everyone would feel welcome.

We do not live in that ideal world. Some people don't feel we should welcome everyone. Others, even some who think they won't act with bias, will do so unconsciously. So to deal with that, systems introduce some bias to counteract the existing bias.

Is this perfectly fair? No of course not. It sucks for those affected. But it's sucked for generations for others. This isn't a machine learning problem where you can throw out your training data and start fresh. We have to retrain the production system on the fly, so that we can get rid of both cultural and artificial bias.

Cut back on your caffiene if you can. Sacrilege, I know (and don't ask me how much I drink a day) but the brain gets used to you providing it and stops making related chemicals. Eventually it stops being a stimulant and becomes a requirement.

Also try a CoQ10 supplement, particularly if you're on Lipitor or other statins.

This is why my personal domain has a catch-all email box for unregistered addresses. I can just make up email addresses and not worry (much) about who might see them.

I've been working remotely for 10 years now, and there are still days I'd kill to have an office to go to for a change of scenery, or a place too work that wasn't also my living room. But when I was working in an office every day, I wanted the option to climb out of bed at the last minute and work in sweats. Humans like variety.

Did they bring that back? It disappeared for a while.

@dextel2 31 OCTober is Halloween in the US. 25 DECember is Christmas. Months in the US are typically abbreviated with three letters

Password field, maybe, with reset options. But with email fields (and I misspoke in the last comment, it's email fields at issue here) I think it's still important. Imagine a transaction that creates the user account and completed the precise at the same time, with no email confirmation. A typo in the domain of the email field becomes an instant customer support case because your customer can't login.

You understand that because of years of experience with good UI design that have taught you what an error on the password registration form means. You understand the problem despite the error message, rather than because of it. And if all users understood those things automatically, web design would be very different

Because not using git means admitting that no one else will ever look at your project

The error message attached to the field with the bad value says to put the same (bad) value in again.

Security

Don't trust the user to stay inside your expectations. Melded families this large (from multiple marriages for each partner) and poly families are out there, if rare. And so are users who want to attack your app or abuse your assumptions for their own gain.

Customers are like infinite monkeys. And crashing web applications is a lot easier than Shakespeare.

To quote what is probably the single greatest dev rant of all time: "Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works. Why do we tell you to turn it off and on again? Because we don't have the slightest clue what's wrong with it, and it's really easy to induce coma in computers and have their built-in team of automatic doctors try to figure it out for us. The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad."

And that's just an aside in a very long rant. https://stilldrinking.org/programmi...

There was a picture that showed up a couple times recently that read something like "QA doesn't break your code. It breaks your illusions about the code."

I was living in Denver and got assigned to help with QA and documentation for a project run by an East coast office. The meeting to get me involved was rescheduled no less than 5 times, and always for early morning east coast time, so I'd get up and drag my ass to the office, just to find a meeting cancellation.

Eventually the invites stopped coming. Never did find out if the project was released or cancelled.

The amazing part of this is that when confronted with evidence they admitted fault instead of saying you doctored the logs

Just remember to not pick a default. Make skipping ads when you accidentally click on one so much easier

Heisenberg bug (aka heisenbug): any bug that disappears as soon as someone with the necessary skills and/or access tries to investigate it.

Never QA your own stuff. Even if you get everything right you screw something up.

At my last job I occasionally did small dev tasks. One time I had to add a third party service to the site. Now we actually had two sites running in this instance, and of course I added the cartridge to the wrong site. Like 10 minutes before I was supposed to review it with my boss and the PM, I noticed, pushed the meeting back until the afternoon with some excuse about wanting to test one more thing, and frantically moved the code.

Everything went fine thankfully, and two weeks later I got asked how long it would take to add it to the other site. "Oh, not long..."

git cherrypick ...

Hopefully I managed to convey the message in a deniable fashion despite not actually using the words

@sam9669 the Private Internet Access vpn service is like $40/year, and you can use it to bounce around the world when you need to test your website from random countries.

As a QA engineer, thank you.

There were a lot of punchlines to this one from the community, but my favorite one was: "Bar opens. First customer walks in and asks where the bathrooms are. Bar explodes."

@Kro9k No, when the patents expire anyone can use them, just as when patents expire on drugs generics become available. You will soon no longer have to pay anyone for the privilege of decoding mp3s. I suppose there's a small window right now where you can't bring a new product to market the plays them, but when the last patent expires at (I think) the end of the year, that's no longer an issue.