My biggest flaw when working in IT: I will refuse to prioritize time- consuming work with minimal added value (cf premature optimization, 0.001% edge cases) when I have a backlog of work that will add much more, obvious value and I will not budge to manager or architect power-plays and tendencies to micromanage my responsibilities, even if it may eventually end up getting me in trouble.

This is what you're in for when you go for THE state-of-the-art "React stack". What you see in the screenshot below is the hellofresh.be website (it's the same as .com). It uses Next.js, React, emotion & styled-components (2 CSS-in-JS libraries). It uses 140MB of RAM for a single tab with some product cards and a slider, logs 70 console errors in production, and fails to load 3/4 times on Firefox.

On mobile, opening a meal card to view its recipe literally takes up to 10 seconds (and I have good connection and performant devices) and you can't choose the last meal card because a f*ing overlay hides the "add" button. And this is a global company with millions in revenue.

All this bugginess has already resulted in incorrect or missed deliveries and they're not doing anything about it. F* you Next.js & F* you HelloFresh IT management

I found Server-Side Rendering in Next.js & astro a difficult sell (and I'm not a JS framework enthusiast), but this Solid JS SSR guide makes me want to consider it, maybe: https://solidjs.com/guides/server/. I really like the philosophy of one of their subpackages: https://github.com/solidjs/solid/...
This could inspire future enhancements to the foundations of my SSG, metalsmith.

Take a few seconds to reflect on the insane amount of human time and effort that goes into making development bearable or just possible on Windows.

A few examples: bash (MINGW & MSYS), make, symlinks, docker (docker-toolbox, WSL), Apache (W/X/LAMP)

RTFM (Read the manual)

Say you have some CMS webapp/site and you want to automate versioning of templates/ theming so you can do reliable rollbacks & more, and have the changes you make deployed to the webapp/site without further intervention.

How would you do it, in rough lines, from source change to auto-deploy?

I am wondering whether this is a good devops question and am curious about actual answers

After having witnessed developers use IntelliJ's built-in git functionality, I am persuaded that it should have never existed in the first place.

Asking you if you want to git add after every file you create, providing dangerous shortcuts that do pull, merge and push at once, but most importantly providing just enough comfort to keep their users ignorant about interactive git add or rebase, and other advanced git functionality.

The search for all the UI buttons + IntelliJ's baseline 5G RAM consumption is both slower and more error-prone than using the Git CLI

You know what´s really retarded?

How HP decided to put the delete key next to the power button on their Elitebooks (and make the power button part of the top keyboard row)

Travis CI

Down a non-technical rabbit hole yesterday:
- watch a cat bury his poop during smoke break
- google "why do cats bury their poop"
- click a link to the Felidae family
- get interested in the differences between puma's, cheetahs and tigers
- read up on the whole genealogy in detail
- spend an hour looking up the endangered status of Felidae
- close work laptop

"Nuff for today"

Competent software engineers are in high demand in Belgium. If you are looking for a workplace that treats devs as demi-Gods, relocate now.

Perks available to you are:
- working from home 2-5 days/ week.
- English at the workplace because the northern & southern parts don't speak each other's languages
- terrible rush hour traffic jams allowing you to flexibly choose your schedule as long as there is enough overlap
- pension & hospital insurance
- a company car (electric or fuel)
- ability to get away with any lack of soft skills as long as you're technically strong
- a competitive salary (2-4k/mo), even with almost half of it being eaten by taxes
- limited competition, because there's a sore lack of competent developers

MS Teams with multiple work accounts account swap flow:

1. Try to close the company-bound login modal 10x while being fast enough to also close the main Teams window.
2. Realize it's not gonna work, so login with the account you don't want to be on.
3. Have to type your phone pincode then accept the MS Authenticator login, and retype your pin code.
4. Finally logged in just to log back out and get the generic account choice modal so repeat step 2 & 3 with the correct account.

Seems like "Google Magic" and I have a disagreement (nb: this is the 4th of Snyk auto-follow up mails and I have no idea why they speak to me in French)

Looking back on it, I don't understand why I used merge commit strategy as go-to to merge git branches the first +-3 years of my career. It sucks

Guess I was just afraid of rebase after I accidentally erased history the first time I used it and failed.

Woah TIL

"Kinder Surprise is a hollow milk chocolate egg shell containing a toy. [...] it is banned in the US since the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits confectionary products containing 'non-nutritive objects'"

I loved collecting those toys as a child (and still love the chocolate)

Here I am at half past midnight with a pencil and a pair of scissors printing grayscale metalsmith js business cards and manually cutting them for the upcoming jsworldconference.

Not pretending it has a chance against the giant amount of sponsoring the likes of Vue and React get, but hey I will have tried!

Me at 3 front-end tech screenings of candidates with +3y of exp last year: "can you name a few npm commands you have used?"

Candidate:
- "Ehh.. npm start?" (npm start is a shortcut to a user-defined run-script)
- "npm version, it publishes the package" (wrong)
- "not going to pretend I know and sound stupid"

Mind you these candidates were not necessarily bad, but come on? You never used npm info, outdated, audit, install, remove, update, why, link, init?

Just look at the open issues counters for "state-of-the-art" "production-ready" JS packages:

https://github.com/storybookjs/....
Almost 1900.
https://github.com/vercel/next.js
More than 1200.

It's just depressing

My non-developer friend (who knows some very rudimentary basics about front-end web dev through me) asked ChatGPT to create a game with an arrow-key (left, right) movable player that shoots bullets.

He pasted the answer in a jsfiddle. The first iteration didn't work. It used DOM and CSS, so I told him he needed to instruct it to use HTML canvas. Lo and behold: https://jsfiddle.net/mehp8jay/

The cost of energy in the EU combined with 10% inflation (but not salary increase) has become crushing to the point offices and households shut off heating and use battery lamps and candles for light. Avg. Year total for energy is over 9000€ in Belgium! At this rate we will burn through our savings for basic utilities

Last week I conducted a FE React-JS tech interview (high-level, no coding challenge) with a potential new hire. He knew his stuff in React 16.8+ but I was baffled npm install was the only npm command he could name, he'd never heard about semver, never used SASS, and didn't have any Nodejs exp. I asked him to name a tough situation he encountered and solved in React, and he said "too many re-renders, so we used useMemo and useCallback" but that's kind of basic and it was evident he didn't understand this meant passing props by reference under the hood. So I wrote a very mixed report, but this is only the 3rd interview conducted. Was I too harsh? To me this signaled a lack of curiosity (especially for a self-taught programmer which he was). My manager was kind of disappointed about the guy following my report.

We've all been there before mastering git commit --amend, rebase, and squash

That's gotta hurt dawg: Emotion(a CSS-in-JS library)'s 2nd most active maintainer ditches own solution for SASS + CSS modules: https://dev.to/srmagura/...

Didn't feel right from the start. Everyone showing their true feelings for CSS-in-JS in the comment section.

Please tell me the next big thing will be going back to basics & not go to even more insane lenghts for marginal DX improvements.

The failure of the free market, triumph of common sense and a big middlefinger to Apple https://greekreporter.com/2022/06/...

So if the current trend in software engineering is over-engineering, then the next can only be under-or appropriate engineering? =/

Definitely hoping it will be less proprietary, less custom DSL´s and grassroots driven

‘Groundhogging refers to the idea that people are going for the same type of person over and over again, while expecting different results,’ they explain. ‘People pick out someone who fits their ideal type, date them, but end up feeling underwhelmed.'
From: https://metro.co.uk/2022/02/...

Awfully resembles a pure function makeLoveHappenForMe with a single arg typeOfPerson:

const typeOfPerson = Jerk
// this is a pure function
makeLoveHappenForMe(new Jerk())
// will always fail
// but does it really have no side effects?

For some reason I always have a hard time mentally mapping "asc/desc" to dates. I think of stairs and mentally map the dates to unicode timestamps. Am I the only one? Sort descending by date is newest first, btw

git
Linux
VLC media player
Inkscape
LibreOffice
Metalsmith js

100's of low-level NPM packages I don't know the name of

RAAAAAAH fuck fuck fucking shit!!! Fuck jest Typescript "on the fly" compilation esModuleInterop typeroots, missing definitions jest ts-ignore and xtest everywhere, manual npm linking with different pkg mgrs & pub to a private registry, building docker images locally and doing tag management across git, docker & kubernetes then cross fingers that prod which has 0 common setup with local & test somehow works, open architecture "tickets" and wait months before they resolve, then repeat ad infinitum. How the fuck can I be productive when I need to be all over the place all the time and deal with these meta-code shenanigans. I just wanna code, damned

Should you not know or not have realised it years after your study: "video" literally means "I see" and "Volvo" (the Swedish car brand) means "I roll" in Latin.