Dearest LinkedIn, no-one *ever* cares about work anniversaries. It's not a thing. Stop trying to make it a thing.

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

!rant

So my employer just offered me a 57% raise out of the blue!
Last Friday, I got a meeting invite from the CEO (its a small 15 person company, so he looks after most of the management stuff) titled "{{myname}} - Salary Review". No agenda there. I was fuckin scared that maybe my salary will be chopped short due to the virus and shit. They recently let go of one guy in my team, and are about to hire two new guys. Also, my last raise was this January. So I didn't think any good could come out of this meeting.

I joined the zoom and he asked if I was happy with the current salary. I said "yes" like an idiot, but added that the prices in my country are rising a lot. He made smalltalk on costs of groceries and Corona and my family, and that was it. 57%.

I was smiling like a dumbass at the end of the meeting. This guy is like the Hyman Roth of this business.

....Meme....

My type of developer

Not my mom, but my girlfriends grandmother. I told her that I am a software developer, a guy who makes the programs which run on computers.

She became really excited about that, because finally she found someone to repair her 40-year-old radio. I told her that I have no fucking idea about radios, but she did not want to hear that. So I looked at the case, randomly pushed some buttons and again told her, that I could not find the broken part, let alone repair it. But she didn't listen and told me to open the case and look inside.

Sighingly I opened the radio, looked at the inner parts and told her once more, that I don't know anything about this stuff. She told me to look more closely. About to lose my mind about this pointless task, I finally told her, that "the transistor" is the problem and that the best thing she could do is to throw it away and buy a new radio. She was happy with that answer.

Ok something went wrong.
I don't know how this could happen.

🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔

I finished a side project.

How could this happen?

🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔

Ahh I know. It is absolutely useless.

Lazy developer

Something new.....

refactor...

Computer science students and data scientists rejoice, "All algorithms" implemented in many common languages:

https://github.com/TheAlgorithms

True story.

That's why I love JavaScript.

how to deal with errors:

"I'm a full stack dev."

<html>
<h1 style="color: red">
<?php echo("Hello world"); ?>
</h1>
</html>

...

Where's my caviar

When you realize that you're googling an error message you've implemented yourself

Ran into a girl who I had a crush on in high school at a bar last week. Hanged out for a bit, but then I had to run catch the last train home.

Today I get a message from her that reads: "Hey, it was nice to meet you last week. Can I call you some time, there's something I want to tell you. 😉"

I think to myself -- sweet and say that I have no meetings today, call me whenever you can.

A couple of minutes later she calls me, and the first thing she says: "I have this app idea..."

fuck, shouldn't have hyped myself up.

Opening BIOS

Le monday morning after a commit on sunday evening...

PM: BLAAAH!!!! Your commit broke the site, nothing is working!!!!!!
Me: What? All of tests passed (coverage 95%), no issues were found.
PM: NOO!!!! Site is broken, we can't use it no more!!!
Me: Ok, what's the problem?
PM: I've tried to enter -10021 into this field on that page and it gived me an error.
Me: Ok? So, that single page is broken?
PM: No, whole site!!!! This is important
Me: Sure... Let me take a look

* PM tried to enter a negative value into an unsigned field that I've mutated yesterday after checking LIVE database if there was no records with negative value. Reason: we've hit an int limit and there was no chance that the value would be negative. Validation? Well, yes.... Except that page was added by him this morning without even checking everything else *

Me: Here, this is the issue, *gives explanation*
PM: Well.... You shouldn't do this. This is unacceptable. You must never leave int fields without negative values. Didn't they teach you in school that integers can be negative?!
Me: What? *consufed as hell*
PM: *More morale... blah blah blah....* Revert it back!
Me: Ok but if anything else breaks, copy of this slack conversation will be kept.
PM: Don't care! Fix it!
Me: * Reverts the fix, saves chat copy * - Done.
PM: Great.

* 5 wild minutes later *
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Site is down, service is not working, what have you done?
Me: Reverted the change needed for it to work. Todays schedule is full with other important tasks. * pastes a screenshot as a proof that he asked me to do this *
PM: FIX IT NOW! Apply your fix.
Me: You're the PM. - Done.
PM: Great, now I'll fix my code. You should be more careful next time.
Me: * YOU DENSE MATHA...KER * Sure.

How's your morning going? :)

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

Never tell anybody that you know how to code...

Today I learned:

`/usr` stands for “universal system resources” not “user”

`/dev` stands for “device” not “development”

Had no idea.

Kenyans lost these great devs in a terror attack. A moment of silence

So true 💡

Dont get attached to your code at work! Coz it's not your code, you got paid for writing that code and that's it.

Last week:

Client: Hey sometimes when I sent about 20 messages to your app they need a long time to arrive. Why is your app so slow?

Me: We are using Google Cloud Messaging to deliver messages. There is no guarantee when messages arrive.

Client: So such a big company is the fault? And not you? Pls make it faster. Make it always act the same.

Working as a programmer is pain in the ass because the people with the money don't know a shit about anything.

I changed just a fucking useless string.. I deployed the "new version" and I told him I boosted everything.

Today he spoked with my buddy about another thing and he told him by the way the app is now much faster.

..placebo update

Been looking around ways to improve devrant's user experience a little, Idk whether you guys like it or not.. Just a suggestion 😂

Contributor badge 👍

Regarding the whole GitHub purchase:

At least it wasn't Oracle.