Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the Charlie Brown of development and Lucy with the football is the XAMPP/MAMP/WAMP software in this world. EVERY. TIME. I. TRY. TO. SPIN. THIS. UP. IT. FAILS. It doesn't matter which tutorial I follow for which technology stack or CMS, the result is always the same. Something about the database or htaccess or some other stupid setting makes it impossible for me to create a simple dev environment on my system.

I have been doing this dance for 24 YEARS NOW!!!! The original programmer of Apache is a 2nd-degree acquaintance who used to be available to help me with this, but no more. I feel like a complete and utter failure as a web developer every time I try to set up XAMPP, and, the rare times I've succeeded and gotten a basic CMS up and running, I fail again and again with all these build/run/task tools I'm now supposed to be using. After a week of fiddling with my local dev environment, I give up and delete it all. I go right back to on-server development "the old fashioned way". WHY!? WHY IS THIS SO HARD?

I'm stepping on rakes here and about to quit. I'm probably just too OLD and STUPID for all these stacks and frameworks and tools and maybe even for this career now. I should probably quit and become a "facilities manager" at a tech firm somewhere, cleaning up the bathrooms and sweeping floors and watching all these young geniuses tut-tut about "Poor StackODev. I hear he had 24 years as a web developer, but then he snapped and he's never been the same."

Have you ever gotten so frustrated with coding and dealing with constant churn and issues and stupid people that you just wanna burn it all down and start a whole new career in a completely different field?

What do you hate about software and developer tutorials and how would you change them? What would totally disrupt the status quo with tutorials and make them easier to finish/useful/memorable/fun?

Before you fire me and delete me as admin from managing your website, also be sure to check on and have me transfer to you the third-party stuff, like Cloudflare or Mailchimp. Remember how I had to set these up on my own on your behalf (because you don't know what you're doing and those alerts would disappear into your unmanaged inbox)? Think first to make sure you have full control over your WHOLE site. You see, what happens when I delete those accounts is no longer my problem once I walk out the door.

I built a fairly simple database and website to showcase school curriculum “reader” books searchable and sortable by levels of difficulty and other metadata. I didn’t think much of it when I was building it but apparently it won the company a few million bucks in revenues once it launched. The big wigs rewarded that by selecting me as one of a few folks that got to go to a big corporate retreat in the Bahamas. This was before the company management went to crap and stopped incentivizing innovations at the employee level.

Weeks later and I’m still watching a former client/friend completely thrash his own website trying to do what I had been doing for him. When I built the thing, I did so in anticipation of him wanting to take it over so I made it as easy as possible. All we needed to do was have a one hour or less meeting to go over some particulars and he would’ve been golden. But, no, he deleted my access and tried to go it on his own. If he EVER comes back begging to have me fix his problems, I swear I’m going to have the biggest belly laugh of my existence right in his face. No. Freaking. Way.

1. Fire all of my clients, including ungrateful friends I’ve done free work for
2. Shut down my business
3. Maybe start a new business, or completely switch careers to something more interesting
4. Keep working my full time job which, miraculously, allows me lots of time to keep screwing around with my own career and entrepreneurial goals
5. Keep saving and investing so I can retire and travel well before I have to wear adult diapers and walk with a cane

Thought this might be useful to some of you having trouble with cheap clients.

I have a 16 year old son who is off-and-on showing interest in learning electronics. He wants to work for NASA someday. I’ve looked at dozens of Arduino and Raspberry Pi kits but I feel like he would benefit not so much from “mostly done for him” types of kits that are more like toys, but the kind that teach more fundamentals like resistors, capacitors, transistors, relays, etc. In other words, knowing first what the principles are behind the fancier kits. Do any of you have a recommendation of kits that start with the fundamentals, but that can still be inspiring and engaging?

Watching someone screw up their own website...

The one you did for them for free because you're good friends...

Who then kicks you to the curb and "unfriends" you IRL over some stupid misunderstanding...

Well, it's time to pop some popcorn, kick back, and watch that dumpster fire from afar. https://gph.is/2p6q53C

Building sites for friends as a favor. You’d think I’d have learned by now that this is an eventual friendship killer. And if the site isn’t the friendship killer, when a friendship goes bad, the site becomes like a kid in a custody dispute. In my case, I’m happy to turn the kid over, but you gotta pay attention to what I tell you about him because when he misbehaves, you’re not gonna want to seek me out for a solution.

I finally have a quiet Saturday to record a tutorial video for a client. I begin recording the video and every damn lawn mower in my neighborhood starts up simultaneously. The universe is _absolutely_ conspiring against me.

*Website exists*

Client: “I should be rich by now. Please fix.”

Me: “... Did you do any ... marketing?”

Client: “I don’t have money for marketing. That’s what the website is for.”

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...