I got hired to run an A/B test between a competitor landing page and a new page. While I didn’t do the new page initial design, I did advise on and completed its final tweaks. The result was a 430% increase in leads generated over the original.

I've been using Git since 2014. So why do I STILL cringe whenever I have to revert commits or do a hard reset back to HEAD? What's going to disappear? What will remain? Will my entire Git history be vaporized? It's a total game of Russian Roulette to me. So, without the certainty level I want, I just do what feels safer...I grab the versions of the files I think are what I need and stick them back into my repo, then git status and commit the correct changes back in.

Discussion forum software: what is the most stable and secure as well as regularly updated package out there?

"Hello. We have taken your forum database hostage. Send 0.09 BTC to..."

I hate my life.

Me: “We should use WordPress so the marketing person doesn’t have to wait weeks to get on our dev schedule to make simple edits.”

Boss: “You’re fired for even suggesting we use WordPress. We are more pure than this.”

Me: *leaves company*

3 years later, company uses WordPress after boss who fired me is also fired.

Been working on a particularly elusive HTML menu sizing glitch for over a year now, trying to get it to appear consistently enough to track down its cause. Finally a) got it to happen in a browser so I could hit it with Chrome Inspector and b) figured out what was probably causing it and fixed it.

And then...

*happens again*

*cannot reproduce the issue, but bossman can*

me --> *commits suicide*

A long time ago in an office far away, my cube mate and one of my reports got into a fist fight. My cube mate got fired over that. Messed up everyone’s entire week.

A couple months later, 9/11 happened and we all had to evacuate the city.

I've met a potential client who has a popular website, but it was last designed in...get this...1995. The design literally has not been updated since then, except to update content via Dreamweaver. DREAMWEAVER! Sure, it runs fast in terms of page speed. But it's using tables for layout, has no CSS, and tags that have been deprecated for over 15 years now. And, of course, it's hosted on GoDaddy. Just...wow.

So I noticed people are increasingly putting their preferred pronouns on their social media, email signatures, résumés, etc. I also noticed a certain amount of praise gets ladled onto the ones who are other than their cisgender while heaps of scorn come at those whose pronouns match their apparent gender. Especially if they dare defend an idea that non-cis people are against.

Is this the world we live in now? Or is my little corner of the online world just a non-representative fluke, and non-cis people are actually more tolerant than I’m seeing?

“Please develop my complicated eCommerce website. The cost should be somewhere between $0 and $100 because I can do it with a template in Wix or SquareSpace or hire a bot non-person from Fiverr to do it for me if you don’t honor the price I’m asking.”

—United States

Next time you think you’re failing at a new open source venture, remember the stories of your UNIX ancestors (eunuchs ancestors?) ;)

Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure
Today, Unix powers iOS and Android—its legend begins with a gator and a trio of researchers.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/...

Sure, client. Go ahead and add a button to your website that proclaims to do something, but then don't bother hiring a developer to make it do that thing when clicked. It'll all happen by Maaaaaagic!

Me: "You should go with this other option for the software. It's cheaper and you can do more."
Client: "No. This more expensive and less-capable thing I chose is better. We'll make it work."
[several weeks pass]
Client: "This isn't working. Why didn't it work?"
Me: "You have to upgrade to a more expensive plan, or switch to the other solution I told you about."
Client: "No. We'll make it work."
Me: *facepalm*

“Do we run the technology, or does the technology run us?” Current Sr. Google Engineer Goes Public on Camera: Tech is “dangerous”, “taking sides”

https://youtu.be/ricI5t66cj8

He’s fired in 5...4...3...

I hate myself. I’m trying to grow my client base by proactively cold-calling and cold-emailing and cold-visiting dozens of likely prospects. There just appears to be no other way to do this in my area. I don’t have the thousands of dollars per month required to get traction in online ads. Why do I hate myself? Because I have to stoop as low as the sales bros I can’t stand to be around. Feeling like a car salesman in a cheap pinstriped suit. I got into tech so I wouldn’t have to do this crap. But how am I supposed to get clients without the shuck and jive of being a salesman? Ugh.

Stupid FaceApp. “Gee! It’s an election cycle. Let’s all download a selfie app from Russia!”

What’s everyone’s take on this app? I’ve seen articles saying it’s no big deal because their servers are all in the US and it doesn’t access the photo library and blah blah blah. My issue is that the photo it takes goes to the cloud for processing. Control lost.

In Soviet Russia, app play YOU!

Looking for recommendations on electronics learning kits. My 16 year-old son has recently been tearing into old electronics and trying to make new stuff with the components. I want to give him a more formal and engaging intro to what it is he’s playing with and how many other cool things he could do. He does struggle a bit with math and gets discouraged easily if he doesn’t understand new concepts or why they’re relevant. So, if you know of a good learning kit that balances lots of cool possibilities with good documentation and tutorials, I’d appreciate a little help.

I’m currently looking at Elegoo. https://amazon.com/EL-KIT-008-Proje...

Getting real tired of your crap, Google. How can I be a technology worker in a world where I have to help clients who use your services without destroying my own privacy in the process? If I tried to live off the grid and keep my profession, it would be like an Amish person doing IT by writing code, etc. on paper with a pen and giving it to someone else to type into a computer.

https://cnbc.com/2019/07/...

Client asks for redesign to look more like XYZ site.

I deliver a redesign to look more like XYZ site.

Client wants the site to look more like his old site. But different. Gives extensive instructions on how to design his website to his liking.

At some point, I think I'll be owing him money for his design/dev services, not the other way around.

What is it with these people?

I don’t love to code. It kinda sucks, TBH. I love to make money and get closer to a hopefully early retirement. Coding is only part of how I’m getting there.

HOLY CRAP STACKOVERFLOW! I get that you're trying to make it easier for people to get their questions answered by structuring question-asking into a multi-form wizard with guides and problem-checking along the way. But when you block my question from being submitted AT ALL after I've done _absolutely everything_ you've asked and then you tell me that my question isn't valid simply because someone HAPPENED to mention in THEIR question A SINGLE KEYWORD I've included in my question? Like the word "What" or "How" or "img srcset" even though I've ALREADY READ THOSE AND THEY DON'T ANSWER MY QUESTION? That seems to be a bit of a jerk move, doncha think?

(Yes, I know the question showing in the screenshot isn't relevant to my question. I was just being a smart aleck at this point because NONE of the relevant questions I tried would unblock me.)

I guess all questions ever asked or that will ever be asked are already answered on StackOverflow.

I hate when I have a development question and the only answers out there seem to be from 5 years ago. And when I apply those solutions, they don't work because old. All that says to me is how stupid I am for even having the question because everyone knows the secret and they're no longer talking about it.

I got out of bed at 2:10am to film the Falcon Heavy launch from my driveway, where I have a direct, due east line of sight to Cape Canaveral. I’m thinking “What a time to be alive!” and “Why didn’t I pursue the aerospace career I started in college?”

I know the video editing software LightWorks has its aficionados. I can see how it's powerful. I've been using it since at least version 12. But my gosh how it screws people over. In the latest version, when you import files into a project and then want to delete _just the reference_ to the files in the project, LightWorks says "Nope, imma delete the FILE, too!" So you can never just start over with an import. When you import a bunch of still photos in one shot, no matter how many, it imports them all as an unwatchably fast 1 second video sequence instead of as an individual file. Like...what? And they've dumbed down the interface so much that there's no toolbar. You have to right-click poke at everything to try to find where stuff is. And right clicking is NON-EXISTENT on a Mac. I had to use a pen tablet to achieve it. I'm too cheap to buy Adobe Premiere for the few times I have to edit video in a year, so I guess it's just ShotCut on Windows for the rest of my life.

Life Coach: "I want a website where I can charge $5,000 for 6 weeks of coaching for [weird life problem very few people have or think about].

Me: "That'll be $5,000."

Life Coach: "That's too expensive for a website."

Me (inner voice): "tHaT's ToO eXpEnSiVe FoR a WeBsItE."

Me (real voice): "Consider it not as a cost but as an investment necessary to obtaining your first customer. Once the first customer is realized, you've paid for the website and the future customers will make you profitable.

Happy (U.S.) Father’s Day to all the DevRant Dads!

“Epstein promotes concepts. He urges individuals—and parents especially—to abandon the desire for instant gratification and easy answers as early performance on tests isn’t an indicator of professional success. He emphasizes traits over particular skills—be curious, flexible, open-minded, adventurous, experimental, and playful. Try and fail and try again. Explore. Read outside your field. Supply your mind with lots of ideas so that you can make the connections that specialists miss, helping you thrive.

Never decide you are too old or too late to the game to try something new. “The tidy specialization narrative cannot easily fit even [the] relatively kind domains that have most successfully marketed it,” Epstein concludes. “So, about that, one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind…research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated.”

https://qz.com/1638869/...

Don’t be evil.

“Stapleton said she was demoted and told to take medical leave, even though she wasn’t ill. Meredith Whittaker, an artificial intelligence researcher, said she was reassigned and told to stop her well-known research on AI ethics. Both women detailed their experiences in an email to coworkers in April, which was then shared with journalists at Wired and published.”

https://vox.com/policy-and-politics...

When a client’s website is about how he’s an expert at fixing his customers’ psychological problems, and he’s got those same problems and isn’t managing them well at all himself, you just

1. Build site.
2. Get check.
3. Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to even if you really are curious.

It was 1987. I was 13. My first dev project started with a $1,300 IBM PC XT clone I bought from a relative who was a “dealer” of PCs for some company. It took all the savings I had from birthday money and mowing lawns for several summers at $5 a pop.

My mom wanted to encourage me to learn it more in depth, and she also wanted to know more for her job as a librarian, so she bought us a bunch of books about DOS, BASIC, and Assembler.

I first got familiar with DOS and then dove into Assembler without realizing what it really was (and how much easier BASIC would be). After hours and hours of typing in what, to me, then, was complete gibberish, I grabbed the BASIC book to see what it had to offer.

I never went back to the Assembler book.

A kid at school had given me a BASIC program he had typed in from a magazine. It was a flight simulator of sorts but with a helicopter, IIRC. I loaded up that bad boy and got to hacking. I didn’t get much done with it but I did build a few other menu navigation programs to explore the language more.

That led to PROLOG, C, PASCAL, Visual Basic, Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and now PHP.