How awesome is that! NASA's Mars rover software is available on Github: https://github.com/nasa-jpl/.... Also impressive: Github uses WebGL to render 3D previews of STL files! https://github.com/nasa-jpl/....

21st century, baby!

I miss greeting ppl with a firm handshake or cheek brush & kiss sound. The half-hearted elbow touch just doesn't feel remotely as nice.

This just made my day, and this is why I'd love to teach webdev.

* Publish blog update that's been sitting idle locally since months
* Donate 50$ to open-source initiatives (favs are VLC, Linux Mint)
* Contribute meaningfully to relaunch metalsmith static site generator dev
* side projects (TBD)

Can we say that "a basic website is a type of app that serves documents", implying a website is more specific than an app, and the most common type of data served is in the form of a document (html, pdf, json, xml).

I'm trying to see how this argument does for/against flat-file cms'es in specific/ general cases per type of app/ website.

With unlimited time I would come up with needlessly complex solutions with fancy names that do not address the needs of the developers I could no longer identify myself with, open-source it and create stunning promo and marketing pitches then get sponsored by Facebook.

Ah wait someone already got there

- Fuck mobile apps that open links in embedded browser windows
- Fuck Wordpress page builders that use the single content field as an embedded IDrag&DropE.
- Fuck unindented HTML markup
- Fuck plugins with "pro" versions that provide more than 50% of the advertised features.
- Fuck building an app with a SPA framework and then adding SSR cuz ur SEO is fucked.
- Fuck Javascript transitions that are meant to make a site look fancy but slow it the fuck down.

Fuck it.

Vent your frustrations

This will be my last project ever with WordPress. Seems like they added a site "customizer" (wysiwyg) which looks fancy and all, but after a few minutes configuring options the customizer starts lagging, fan starts getting louder, CPU & RAM go up so I do some profiling on that page:

Full layout repaints on every mousemove event, mem usage starts at 125MB and goes up up up to even 200MB while staying idle.. wtf? How did this even get shipped?

Why, just why do 4k devs find this a good idea https://github.com/sindresorhus/.....

Don't get me wrong I respect this oss dev a lot, I just think readme's should be boring with the least distraction possible.

- "Hi A, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID which we were not informed of."
- "Oh but my API just proxies the content from team B."
_____
- "Hi B, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID."
- "Ah, I have nothing to do with category IDs, you should talk to my colleague C."
_____
- "Hi C, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID."
- "I wish I knew anything about that, you should contact person D!"
_____
- "Hi D, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID."
- *changes status to "Absent" on IM*

ERROR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

In the mix for today: 5 devs testing MS Teams collaborative drawing for a GaphQL API project structure, with Halloween and coronavirus in mind

Being a developer allows you to enjoy using most of the creative skills artists also put to use (writing structured prose, design, semantics, ergonomics, ethics), while adding logic, job safety, and a decent paycheck to the mix.

Also: puts you in a good position to readily take advantage of new digital goodies (eg bitcoin), and to understand the gem that is developer humor

KISS, DRY, Path of Least Resistance, Three Strikes and You Refactor, early returns, no array.map when nothing is returned, only use switch when # cases >= 3.

And using var in javascript instead of let/const to piss off my colleagues (and because I understand function scope well)

If you display:block a <span>, just take a <div> man.

No support here. I was doing Communication Studies but spent most of my spare time learning webdev. My parents repeatedly berated me for messing around with it: "You should focus on your studies". Proving them wrong turned out to be THE most powerful drive.

3 years later I nudged my brother in the same direction when he wasn't sure what he wanted to do for a living (with parents' approval).

The final hour of mental torture among many of finding a complex solution to an otherwise simple problem in a React/Typescript project:

Metalsmith is an older but still awesome NodeJS static site generator. Due to metalsmith's original founding company not having done a complete open-source ownership transfer however, active development has stalled for years.

I am super-happy to have been accepted as a member of the Github metalsmith org today in the role of maintainer. Hope I can help bring it back on track. If you're curious please npm i metalsmith and head over to the newly created Gitter chat to share your input: https://gitter.im/metalsmith/... !

When I was 12 I created my own LEGO manuals and monopoly boardgame variants.
When I was 14 and into gaming I had fun playing with a Q3 level editor for Wolfenstein (GtkRadiant), and drew boardgame maps.
When I was 16 I translated the game battledawn.com to French for in-game currency in return.
When I was 18 I fiddled with texture packs for Minecraft and got interested in Total War mods.
When I was 20 I met a student who studied webdev & design. I was so excited about basic HTML, CSS and later JS and PHP, that I read and learnt some every evening (and even failed an exam because I was learning PHP until 5AM)

I always wanted to use my skills to create something of use to others. Open-source is the perfect avenue for that and is also what enabled me to get here in the first place. And though I m've been professionally employed as dev since 2015, only the last 2 yrs I finally consider myself skilled enough to give back something of quality :)

So they develop this app. That uses our front end component library. That queries a GraphQL layer developed as NPM package. That uses a data service abstraction NPM package. That uses another NPM package mapper library. That queries an old REST API returning XML.

It takes days to make a newly added XML node in the bottom-most layer available in the app, requiring changes to 4 repositories and 3 NPM releases.
Refactoring is dead, because 1 change will affect all layers. And the worst part is: theres only 1 app using these packages, so no case for re-use. Overzealous separation of concerns I guess?

"How cryptic do you like your JIRA story descriptions?"

Product owner: YES

What a consultant's gotta do for his timesheet when homeworking:

1. Fill in Excel, send to self by mail (corporate bitlocker protected PC on proxy that doesnt allow local printer connections)
2. Go upstairs to secondary Windows PC (no Excel on main Linux laptop) and open mail
3. Send to printer, wait 10 minutes (old printer needs to 'warm up')
4. Sign timesheet and go back upstairs
5. Scan signed version, send mail to self.
6. Open personal mail on corporate laptop, send to manager. (can't send directly from personal mail)
7. Wait to get back signed timesheet from manager
8. Finally, send to own admin dept.

2 story points completed, time for a break.

Say what you will but React JS development is utterly exhausting. Every React project is a totally new stack and there is no consensus in the ecosystem.That is how I feel after having worked on 5 big SPA React JS projects over the course of 5 years.

The structure of these projects was all but similar: most used HOC's, some render props, functions-as-a-child, hooks or rather component lifecycles, some used container-components, some Redux, others sprinkled business logic & state all over, and yet others use a mix of server-side rendering and "hydration"...

I dangerouslySetInnerHTML on LazyExoticComponents, and dared not useEffect on the DO_NOT_TOUCH_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED root property. Hooks embrace functions, but without sacrificing the practical spirit of React, you see.

I didn't make this up. It's verbatim from the code and the docs.
This is not web development, this is at best a tedious fantasy multiplayer game or at worst, a costly joke.

TIL Github renders markdown YAML frontmatter as nested markdown tables! Awesome as lightweight structured data documentation tool

Me: "do you know about .exe files?"
Girlfriend: "yeah, like '.exe stopped working'"

*Windows exe immediately associated with bugs by common user*

The pandemic aside, even the type of absurd news messages in the Plague Inc mobile game have become reality.

- "President berates reporters for asking 'tough questions' "
- "Corona beer stocks dive as result of coincidentally unfortunate brand name"
- "Man intentionally transmits illness by spitting on police officer."

Except COVID-19, Airport security is also scanning preflight requests and incoming traffic for CORS with its dated test kit (found this unused gem in an old PHP codebase):

The place I currently work at doesn't allow homeworking for consultants. RIP

Having to do 10's of ElasticSearch v2 -> 6 client requests migration manual deploys of a 10-year old PHP/ Javascript codebase where the gulp build's plugins no longer work, the package dependencies have been .gitignore'd (who does that!), and dev cowboys have frequently bypassed version control by making changes directly in production.

Also, no one knows anything about it because the only dev who was supposed to maintain this app left 3 months ago due to unbearable management.

This "binaryextensions" NPM package is a fraud (not to be confused with "binary-extensions"!): https://npmjs.com/package/...; it contains a single JSON array of purportedly "all binary extensions", reaches 700k downloads a week, yet only lists 13 binary extensions (https://github.com/bevry/...).

This is a huge danger to security, especially if it's being used in production environments for input checking. For comparison, here is a much more robust version of a repo with the same goal (https://github.com/sindresorhus/...)

So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.

After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).

Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.

Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.

Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).

I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.