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* The app is almost ready, boss asked me to show the progress.
Boss: The design is bad, I don't like it 🤔
Me: I just implemented the design, which is approved
Boss: Really? because I "feel" that the design is bad on the screen.
Me: Okay 😐, can you tell me what exactly the part to change?
Boss: I don't know, *calls the designer
Designer: *showing his PSDs* yes it is the same, and you [the boss] approved it.
Boss: Ok make some changes to make it feel better.
Me: (Inside: 😡 ) ok, have you some suggestions?
Boss: dunno,
Me: at least tell me what is wrong with it
Boss: dunno
Me:🤢26 -
The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.
I feel like giving up.
I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.
But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...
...why the fuck bother.
I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.
As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.
But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.
It's never fucking fool-proof enough.
Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?
This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.
If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.
At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.
Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.
25 -
I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)
Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"
For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.
What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.16 -
So my school got invited to this coding competition for high-schoolers and among them, I was a part member and part mentor along side our CS professor since I was the most proficient coding stuff (although most of I do were JS and Python stuff although i can read other code)
Then this guy showed up.
He was picked by the faculty to take the WebDev competition. He knows how to use Photoshop for Photo retouchings and stuff but here's a problem.
He can't code nor make a proper website design.
So being the kind person I am, I volunteered to teach him what I know about frontend and HTML. This goes on for 4 weeks of nonstop practices, coding sessions and finally, Code In The Dark-style practice (which involves the person to code a full website for only 15 minutes).
When he was able to finish and mastered some of what I taught. I gave him the go signal and we were on to the road to victory.
Unfortunately our first try, we won nothing.
He said after the competition "I give up man, I can't take this!" but I said, "Just because you lost a f*cking competition once, doesn't mean you're a motherf*cking loser in life. There's still one more chance."
So I pressured our WebDev guy to be more better, taught him about mockups, JavaScript and etc.
Then the second attempt a year later, me and the WebDev guy won and moved on the finals. However, he didn't win the finals and I was the lone champion reprsenting our school.
Although he didn't win, he was happy I carried the torch and win the prize.
Prior to that, he asked me "Hey, how to be like you?"
I only answered, "Achievements are just gold with cloth and paper. Wear it lightly".
Fast forward to today, he's now the school's head design coordinator and layout designer for their newspaper column. He also practices his coding skills by frequenting on our coding sessions even when the competition was over.
But whenever someone asks "who taught you this?" he would only look to me, smile and say "that person right there".7 -
Not one feature.
All analytics systems in general.
Whether it's implementing some tracking script, or building a custom backend for it.
So called "growth hackers" will hate me for this, but I find the results from analytics tools absolutely useless.
I don't subscribe to this whole "data driven" way of doing things, because when you dig down, the data is almost always wrong.
We removed a table view in favor of a tile overview because the majority seemed to use it. Small detail: The tiles were default (bias!), and the table didn't render well on mobile, but when speaking to users they told us they actually liked the table better — we just had to fix it.
Nokia almost went under because of this. Their analytics tools showed them that people loved solid dependable feature phones and hated the slow as fuck smartphones with bad touchscreens — the reality was that people hated details about smartphones, but loved the concept.
Analytics are biased.
They tell dangerous lies.
Did you really have zero Android/Firefox users, or do those users use blocking extensions?
Did people really like page B, or was A's design better except for the incessant crashing?
If a feature increased signups, did you also look at churn? Did you just create a bait marketing campaign with a sudden peak which scares away loyal customers?
The opinions and feelings of users are not objective and easily classifiable, they're fuzzy and detailed with lots of asterisks.
Invite 10 random people to use your product in exchange for a gift coupon, and film them interacting & commenting on usability.
I promise you, those ten people will provide better data than your JS snippet can drag out of a million users.
This talk is pretty great, go watch it:
https://go.ted.com/CyNo6 -
So, I got a paid internship and was tasked to create a game from scratch. They told me to start by creating an idea and so I started creating a Game Design Document with 40+ pages. Fuckin epic idea. The idea is presented to the boss. "Very good. But I want it to have multilayer" *Sigh* Substantial changes are made and I'm eager to start working on my masterpiece. Everybody wanted to see how it would turn out. 2 months into the internship I have to make a presentation to the boss. He tells me that I won't be able to accomplish anything in the limited time of the internship. They change my work completely and I am now part of the main team. Two weeks later I have another presentation. "You have been here for 2 months and this is what you have? This is you progress? You need to do better". A couple of days later I get an email stating that my performance was unsatisfactory and I won't get paid for those 2 months. Like, ARE YOU FUCKIN KIDDING ME! YOU TELL ME TO CHANGE EVERYTHING! 2 MONTHS OF MY LIFE OF HARD WORK WADTED FOR NOTHING! FUCK YOU! SO FUCKIN PISSED!
I have cool coworkers tho16 -
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!22 -
Dude, FUCK automated bathrooms.
First of all, what the hell is so complicated about making a motion sensing faucet that works? Why does it *need* to be motion sensing? I stand there for 5-10 seconds with my stupid soapy hands extended, waiting for a squirt of the divine liquid.
And then the immediately following experience isn't much better. Motion sensing paper towel dispenser. The first go works fine, but it always dispenses half of what you need to get your grimy paws dry. So you go in for seconds, and it just flat out ignores you. Leaves you on read. You flap your pathetic noodle arms at it again. It isn't happening. Please wait 3-5 business days.
Oh, and god forbid you forget to cover the automatic toilet with a few wasted squares. Lean into a shit ONCE and you've just been prematurely flushed. Your ass is misted with the cold, unforgiving equivalent of an automatic insult.
Asshole design12 -
So my friend started a YouTube channel, being the motivational man I am I encouraged him and made him a logo for his channel.
It started here, he called me a bazillion times every single day asking me to make stuff like Channel banners, intros.
He even went so far to call my design bad and that I could do better.
I'm definitely losing my hold on my generosity, it's like this with every single fucktard I help. It's like programmers don't get to have a life, people pitch me stupid ideas at every party.. Having a casual conversation a guy starts talking about an idea.
Oooh... And the worst part they say you can have 60% and just give them 40% 'MINORITY' share for coming up with an idea I could pull up from my arse instantaneously
Next time he asks me something I'm gonna fuck him up or just charge him a bazillion dollars... FUCK FUCK FUCK... REALLY GOT TO BUY THAT STUPID STRESS CUBE15 -
Okay i'm done - YOU FUCKING ANDROID STUDIO MORONS. Being at a high level in C++, I tried to do some android coding. THERE ARE FUCKING NO GOOD TUTORIALS, NO GOOD DOCS, HECK, THE SELF GENERATED CODE OF THE IDE IS WRONG: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON YOU FUCKING MORONS?
oh wait, let me first import android.widgets.rant;
or was it android.widgets.devrant.rant; or was it android.dr.rant.RantManager;?
Oh wait, I know lets search the docs?
OH WAIT THE DOCUMENTATION DOESNT HAVE THAT.
NOW HOW ABOUT I JUST TRY THE EXAMPLE CODE? WELL UH-UH! YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT YOURSELF WHAT TO IMPORT IN ORDER FOR IT TO WORK. ALSO, WHAT FUCKING UP WITH THAT PERMISSION SYSTEM? ITS SO BADLY DOCUMENTED!!!
Oh wait, I'm sure that I have to change something in this file... or was it that other file?
GOD
how dare they have style and design guidelines?
MORONS!
I will resort to implement my app idea in godot, idc anymore... I don't want to burn out because I used the "official high standard" tech.
it definitely isn't high standard and definitely not good. Thank you morons@google
THANK YOU FOR NOTHING
A FRAMEWORK WHERE I NEED 2 DAYS TO FIGURE OUT TO ADD EVENT LISTENERS TO MY THINGS IS DEFINITELY NOT ONE I'D LIKE TO USE.
also, whats up with
AudioRecord (int audioSource, int samplerateInHz, int channelConfig, int audioFormat, int bufferSizeInBytes);
ARE WE BACK IN THE C ERA? CAN'T YOU BE BOTHERED TO IMPLEMENT SOME SIMPLE FUCKING ENUMS????
WHATS THE POINT OF AN OOP LANGUAGE IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE IT LIKE C?
Oh wait I found a tutorial ... First trigger: "java scripts". Second trigger: this guy LITTERALLY ONLY TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLACE WIDGETS ON THE CANVAS. THANKS FOR NOTHING SHERLOCK!
Oh btw: did you know that android studio gives the best error messages?
"Error: illegal start of expression"
NO ERROR MESSAGE - NOTHING!
YOU BETTER USE THE IDE OR YOU GO HOME YOU FUCKER!!!
Oh and btw: if you want to read the best documentation - the code itself YOU GOTTA AGREE TO OR TERMS OF SERVICE!!!! WE DONT WANT ANYBODY TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL WITHOUT US KNOWING!!!!!
THANK YOU GOOGLE FOR NOTHING!
YOU FUCKERS!
thanks godot for *atleast* existing. You are the... last pick i'd pick, but :shrug:, I have experienced android studio now.
If anybody has any advice on what to use instead, please go ahead. And you better not tell me how good you are at android studio. I DONT CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN IMPLEMENT IN ANDROID STUDIO. I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT IS USABLE WITHOUT HAVING TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL WHEN DOING *ANYTHING*!!!!
fuckers.48 -
Short personal Code Editor Review:
Atom (web-based)
Speed 👎
Packages 👍 (relatively up-to-date)
Features 👍
Visual Studio Code (web-based)
Speed 👉
Packages 👍
Features 👍
Sublime Text (native)
Speed 🚀
Packages 👉 (not as up-to-date)
Features 👍
Verdict:
Having worked with all of those editors for at least three weeks each I have come to the following conclusion:
I liked Sublime Text most primarily for it's performance, but was a little disappointed by the fact that the packages were not updated as frequently, not available or VSCode had some that have better support.
Second would be my current editor, Visual Studio Code, which I only use because I need certain packages that were not present on Sublime Text.
Atom is not bad either, it just happens to be the least recent editor I used, it was quite slow but an overall solid editor.
If I had to choose to use one for the rest of my life, I would probably go with Sublime.
I think there is little margin between features across all of those editors, only exception being performance for Sublime Text. I also quite liked the file organisation design of it (which I can't really say about VSCode).
Those are my subjective opinions on the editors, hope it helps some of you decide which one to give a shot next!36 -
Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...
1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.
2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.
3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.
4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.
5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.
6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.
7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.
8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.
9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.
10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE
11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.
12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)
13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.
14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.
Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!20 -
Fuck the memes.
Fuck the framework battles.
Fuck the language battles.
Fuck the titles.
Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:
- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div
and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software
have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.
but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?
recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.
Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.
There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD
why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well
i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.
How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life
we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!
BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!
Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.20 -
For people who think/find that open source solutions are always better than commercial/paid/proprietary ones, you are not going to like this rant.
I'm starting to get really fucking fed up with people always, whenever I see someone (including myself) mentioning that an open source solution which is an alternative to a closed source one, saying that it's shit.
I've had countless encounters on here (also irl) where someone mentions that an open source solution (GIMP or Libre Office for example) is shit by default while they've maybe (or probably?) not even used it themselves.
Also people going "you can't even compare those two as for what they can do/features/functions". I'm definitely not saying that those open solutions are perfect. But to call them worthless or shit and/or to say that you literally 'cannot compare them' or that the open solution just doesn't work as a *FACT* is fucking bullshit.
Let's take GIMP for example, the use case of a friend of mine:
- He works both with macOS and Linux Mint, he *needs* a design/photo editing tool which is cross platform. (or at least one which works on macOS+Linux)
- He does not mind paying for software but he prefers to use software which is free as in freedom because he also likes to tinker with the software (a lot of people find this argument bullshit, I noticed on here. Why is that? It's a valid reason. Maybe not for you but we're not talking about you right now).
- He likes Photoshop but due to Linux incompatibility and the fact that he can't tinker around with the code, it's not an option for him.
- He'd gladly go for paid software but GIMP fills all his design/photo editing needs (also the more advanced ones but don't ask them to me because I have no fucking clue how that shit works)
- GIMP *just works* for him, he never has trouble with it.
Let's take Libre Office, my own use case:
- It *NEEDS* to work on Linux, which Libre does.
- It *HAS* to be open source, ethic/moral thingy; Libre Office is open source.
- It doesn't need to work complete magic but it needs proper basic document and 'excel' sheet functionalities which is the case with Libre and it works *for me*.
- I don't mind paying for it, will probably donate in the future (seeding the macOS+windows+linux versions fulltime at the moment)
See, for our use cases, it works very well. So why go into "it's no match for proprietary alternatives" mode right away? It actually is, as you see in the examples above.
Please stop saying that those solutions *don't work* or *are shit* because they do work and are useful for me and loads of people around the world.
Do they have *ALL* the features which their proprietary alternatives have? Maybe, maybe not, maybe they're missing some and maybe they even have some features which the proprietary alternatives don't have, I haven't checked out every feature.
I'm not saying that it works for you, for the record, I'm just saying that just because for you it is a fact that they're bad/shit/hardly working, doesn't mean they are for others.21 -
My favorite kind of interview question/challenge is anything that is highly practical for the job. At the current company I work, the coding test/interview challenge was to design and implement an API very similar to the core functionality of the actual product. It’s fair, tests for skills relevant to the job, and is much better than irrelevant silly brain teasers and cs questions, I feel.
In terms of specific questions, one of my favorites is one that one of my colleagues suggested I ask to potential candidates: describe what you think your biggest failed project/task was in your engineering career, and what happened/what you learned. I think it’s a good reflective question that can tell a lot about someone.3 -
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.
While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.
So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)
After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.
The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.
My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).
So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.
... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.
1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)
2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)
3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)
4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)
I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.
just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.8 -
Never gonna happen:
* Port our API to graphql. Or even make it just vaguely rest-compliant. Or even just vaguely consistent.
* Migrate from mysql to postgres. Or any sane database.
* Switch codebase from PHP to... well, anything else.
* Teach coworkers to not commit passwords, API keys, etc.
* Teach coworkers to write serious commit messages instead of emoji spam
* Get a silent work environment.
* Get my office to serve better snacks than fermented quinoa spinach bars and raw goat milk kale smoothies
* Find an open source IDE with good framework magic support. Jetbrains, I'll give you my left testicle if you join the light side of the force.
* Buy 2x3 equally sized displays. I'm using 6, but they're various sizes/resolutions.
* Master Rust.
* Finish building my house. I completely replaced the roof, but still have to dig out a cellar (to hide my dead coworkers).
* Repair/replace the foundation of my house (I think Rust is easier)
* Get slim and muscular.
Realistically:
* Get a comfortable salary increase, focus more on platform infrastructure, data design, coaching
* Get fat(ter). Eating, sitting, gaming, coding and sleeping are my hobbies after all.
* Save up for the inevitable mental breakdown-induced retirement.13 -
This is what I found in the logs:
3280546 I had a cup of tea and now it's fixed
9daaf6c copy and paste is not a design pattern
958ca5b It compiles! Ship it!
a9edf8d LAST time, Masahiro, /dev/urandom IS NOT a variable name generator...
438072f 640K ought to be enough for anybody
1fb839b Too lazy to write descriptive message
4d70890 ...
d6ce0c8 Ugh. Bad rebase.
a00b544 Programming the flux capacitor
49715cb Fix my stupidness
4babf07 Do things better, faster, stronger
49b3a7b SEXY RUSSIAN CODES WAITING FOR YOU TO CALL
12c7b55 formatted all
2658c87 and so the crazy refactoring process sees the sunlight after some months in the dark!
2376c89 - Temporary commit.
a83220a I honestly wish I could remember what was going on here...
3347007 work in progress
3382b4c well crap.
109748a Glue. Match sticks. Paper. Build script!
c3f025e Useful text
70394e7 Who knows WTF?!
0d78f14 breathe, =, breathe
5344e39 removed tests since i can't make them green
8a3a6bf better grepping
2777cc4 first blush
cf620ff Continued development...
9591c19 Too lazy to write descriptive message
767e0cd Some shit.
763602a Yes, I was being sarcastic.
8d7a602 /sigh
c6296e5 rats4 -
Client: "the content is pretty confusing and inconsistent. Would you say the frontend is ready?"
Me:"please do not ask that way."
Client: "i just asked a question. What do you mean?"
Me: "well.. you basically say that is bad and then asked me if I thought it was bad."
Client:" i was asking a question. It is your problem if you find that offensive. You were to deliver a finished design until 3pm. "
Me:"you just reviewed it and came up with new input..and apart from that there were just some buttons in the wrong shade."
Client:"yes but I expect that kind of critical input from the developer. "
Me: "I understand, but this was a tiny project for 300 cash. I can't go all out on a budget like this. "
Client:"but all the other jobs I gave you lately were paid much better.."
Me: "yes. Those were other jobs, right? Should I feel obliged to work overtime I eager expectation of more and different work?"
Client: "you used to be more excitable...."
:/1 -
I was fired from a job where the boss had it in for me. He was a really experienced dev, but he was also very arrogant. He hated me questioning him. I didn't have the evidence nor the "political" clout to back up my criticisms.
It was humbling.
I realised two things:
keeping your mouth shut is often the best approach.
And
my own arrogance was keeping me from getting better, from learning new things. Not just for the company, but for myself.
I want to write better code, make better design decisions, utilise design patterns, actually think about what I'm doing, and be able to justify why I'm doing it.
I want to be able to choose the best tools for the job, not the best tools for me.
I want to be a person that is open to criticisms and I want to be someone who is always ready to learn new things.9 -
Arrived at a game jam in an animation school. I hope they're better at game design than they are at cable management :)
7 -
Sometime in mid 2013 or 2014 as a junior dev I woke up to a call from my company's CEO. He informed me that the legacy system they use for order processing is down nationwide that nobody can add new orders until it's fixed and that I needed to fix it. I had been working there 6 months and was hired along with a senior dev to begin developing a web app to replace this legacy system. The senior dev had left the company two weeks earlier for a better offer so it was put on me to figure it out. I was very frank with the CEO and told him I didn't know if I could fix it and suggested he try to call the company they hired to create it. I didn't even know where the source code was let alone what the design paradigm was or whether or not there was any documentation. He said he would try figuring out who created it and give them a call and asked "As a developer you shouldn't you be able to fix this?" I just told him it wasn't that simple and left it at that.
I get to work and the CEO has discovered that the company who created the software no longer exists and I tell him he may need to find a company to consult on this if I can find the source code and if I can't find the code he might be screwed.
I found the source code in a random IT shared folder there is no source control, no documentation, no unit tests, no test environment, and it looks like nobody had touched it since 2005 or about 8 years.
Despite being completely unfamiliar with the code and the design paradigm I was able to figure out that they were validating customer addresses against an old Google geocoding API that was shutdown the day before and the lack of response was killing the application. I fixed the issue and warned the CEO before deployment that I wasn't able to test but he said to go ahead and thankfully all went well.9 -
Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.
Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
See where I'm going here?
Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.
Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?
I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...17 -
Oh my word, shut up everyone about the ESC key. In interface design do you keep something around that 1% of your user base uses, or do you make something better? It's not even gone. It's on the touch bar for fricks sake.
And while we're talking about it, stop calling Apple so innovative. Innovation at Apple died with Steve Jobs. "We developed this awesome new iPad Pro!" it's just a bigger iPad with the same stupid limitations of all iPads. If you want a real portable work tablet, go buy a Surface. "We added a touch bar to the MacBook Pro!" some manufacturers of Windows laptops have had that thing for years!
😰6 -
Stupid shitheads among the web designers, fucking listen up. Your fucking design is not the point of websites - the content is. You are not supposed to shove the content away to have your moron design shine in its purest debility.
Yeah I know, white space minimalism yadda yadda, clean interface - and you dumbasses just remove functionality to simulate a clean interface, to the point of using hamburger fuckups on desktop. Pull your heads out of your asses, that's not how to design an interface! Not to mention that you idiots still guzzle through the megabytes and dozens of domain lookups for your chickenshit minimalism.
While we're at it, not everyone is 20 years old like you youngsters - you won't believe it, but there is life beyond 40, and while such age is unthinkable to you because you are so dumb that you will hardly reach that age anyway, others on this planet have managed to get there. No 20/20 laser sight, you know.
Fuck you with your light grey thin fonts on white background because it looks "clean", it just SUCKS you wankers. Fuck you with your stupid ghost buttons that don't even look like a button. You know how to operate the shit you made, but reality check here, users spend most of their time on fucking other websites than on the abomination you have designed!
Get that into the shit bubble that you call your brain and read WCAG 2.1! That's not only for disabled people, but everyone will be able to use that shit better!8 -
--- SUMMARY OF THE APPLE KEYNOTE ON THE 30TH OF OCTOBER 2018 ---
MacBook Air:
> Retina Display
> Touch ID
> 17% less volume
> 8GB RAM
> 128GB SSD
> T2 Chip (Core i5 with 1.6 GHz / 3.6 GHz in turbo mode)
Price starting at $1199
Mac Mini:
> T2 Chip
> up to 64GB RAM
> up to 2TB all-flash SSD
> better cooling than previous Mac Mini
> more ports than previous Mac Mini - even HDMI, so you can connect it to any monitor of your choice!
> stackable - yes, you can build a whole data center with them!
Price is 799$
Both MacBook Air and Mac Mini are made of 100% recyled aluminium!
Good job, Apple!
iPad Pro:
> home-button moved to trash
> very sexy edges (kinda like iPhone 4, but better)
> all-screen design - no more ugly borders on the top and bottom of the screen
> 15% thinner and 25% less volume than previous iPads
> liquid retina display (same as the new iPhone XR)
> Face ID - The most secure way to login to your iPad!
> A12X Bionic Chip - Insane performance!
> up to 1TB storage - Whoa!
> USB-C - Allow you to connect your iPad to anything! You can even charge your iPhone with your iPad! How cool is that?!
> new Apple Pencil that attaches to the iPad Pro and charges wirelessly
> new, redesigned physical keyboard
Price starting at 799$
Also, Apple introduced "Today at Apple" - Hundreds of sessions and workshops hosted at apple stores everywhere in the world, where you can learn about photography, coding, art and more! (Using Apple devices of course)16 -
I've found sites like Udemy/Khanacademy/Codecademy/Brilliant/Edx to be very useful — possibly more useful than expensive education.
But they still need:
1. Better correction/update mechanisms. Human teachers make mistakes and material gets outdated, and while online teachers are rectified faster than classroom teachers, the procedure is still not optimal. Knowledge should be a bit more like a verified wiki.
2. Some have great interactive coding environments, some have great videos, some have awesome texts, some have helpful communities. None has it all. In the end, I don't want to learn a new language by writing code in my browser. It could all be integrated/synced to the point where IDEs have plugins which are synced to online videos, with tests and exercises built in, up to a social network where you could send snippets for review and add reviews to other people's code.
3. Accreditation. Some platforms offer this against payment, but I think those platforms often feel very old school (pun intended), with fixed schedules, marks and enrollments. Self paced is a must.
4. Depth is important. Current online courses are often a bit introductory. We need more advanced courses about algorithms, theoretical computer science, code design, relational algebra, category theory, etc. I get that it's about supply/demand, but we will eventually need to have those topics covered.
I do believe that for CS, full online education will eventually win from the classroom — it's still in its infancy, but has more potential to grow into correct, modern education.10 -
Request: I don't like the way the page looks. Make it better.
Question: can you give me some more info? What is it that you dislike about the page? You approved the design, the mockup, the HTML version...and we just finished implementing the backend. Can you be more specific?
Response: make it more like this *gives link to completly new layout from a theme on themeforest*. Why does mine not look like this. Make it like this!
Reaction: *fuck this shit, never freelancing again...* Well, then do it yourself. I'm done!
// best feeling ever :)3 -
It's enough. I have to quit my job.
December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.
Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.
The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.
After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.
I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.
The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.
After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.
The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.
And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE
My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!2 -
Yet another rant about crappy electronic designs.
Just now I was cleaning my desk and stumbled upon some old hard drive in a caddy that I still had laying around.. I figured, let's plug it in and see whether the drive still works. And to some extent, it does! Except that every few minutes it craps out on me. And after disassembling the caddy, I think that I know why.
Just as background information, hard drives work at 12V and generally require about 10W to spin their motor. Meanwhile USB operates at 5V. So a boost converter needs to be present in the controller to step up the voltage and power the drive.
Now what's a boost converter? It's an inductor, a capacitor, a transistor and a diode in a specific arrangement (if you're interested in the design, check out https://youtube.com/watch/...), along with feedback circuitry to stabilize output voltage. Now that transistor is important.. it switches at very high frequency, and its rise and fall times create heat. In the particular transistor used in that controller, it apparently causes the transistor to operate at 65-68°C. That's quite toasty IMO, and overheating may be why the controller is so unstable. But the Chinese manufacturers thought that it's just fine and okay to be sold without heatsink or some research into transistors with better rise and fall times.
So the hard drive craps out on me and yet again it's because of certified shitdesigns. MOTHERFUCKTURERS!!!!27 -
When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...
I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.
Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!
That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…
Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…
<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).
I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!
When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”
That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!
A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”
Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…
What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…6 -
Dear client / customer
You have been misled. The customer is not always right. The sooner you realise this and start listening to us as the consultants you hired the better things are going to get. If you were experts in how to do this stuff you wouldn't need us. Please recognise the skills.
Best regards
The design & development community3 -
Please. Hear me out.
I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.
And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.
It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.
As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.
The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).
This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.
You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.
Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.
Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.
But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.22 -
Manager: Messages not visible! bug ticket!!!!
Dev: oh fuck, there's an issue with our chat system, not good! _inspects ticket_ oh, it's just a display issue that actually is according to the previous spec, yawn...
Dev: please describe the bug better next time, I though we had a major outage, this is simply a small design issue...
Manager: ...
Dev: ...
I think I'm quitting soon guys. I literally do not get paid enough to deal with these incompetent idiots each day.
Meanwhile:
Management: forget your shitty salary, take one for the team, you get 3% of the shares in the company!!!!
Dev: what fucking shares, you haven't even converted to a corporation yet, THERE ARE NO SHARES
Management: ...
Dev: ...
Oh yeah and they called me at 6:30 PM today: "so i guess you are winding down for the day"
fuck outta here i haven't been working since 5 you fucks
jesus i swear some people need to screw their fucking head on straight, so far gone into the hUsTlE CuLtUrE they don't even know what reality is anymore7 -
I did a 3 years study in computer science.
I got an intern that is on her last year of a 5 years study in computer science too.
So we have the same age, just that I have more practical experiences than her and she have more theoretical baggage than me.
We are discussing on the design of what she will do over her internship and while I'm talking about some JSON modelling she interrupt me to say something like "so this tuple is meaning..." talking about a JSON object. I didn't get what she was talking about (I never did python and didn't learn much about mathematical theorems during my study) so I asked her: "What is a tuple?".. She looked at me with dead eyes saying "what!? you don't know this ?!!" Like I was the dumbest man on earth. Fortunately our PM which is also a coding guy was sitting next to us and explained to me that by saying "tuple" she meant a "JSON object" and to her that it IS normal if I do not know what a tuple is, first because of my studies, 2nd because my job is to be an Android Dev and that I do not need to know this to do my job. He added that by the way I'm doing well my job and that if I wasn't there to help her on her code she would never succeed her internship.
I'm glad my PM intervene but fuck those who always think they know everything better than others without questioning themselves before !12 -
I'm really close to just quitting coding all together. This job is sucking the life out of me. I've lost my interest in code and the idea that there are better jobs out there.
My "boss" who's not even really my boss but behaves like he is, is micromanaging my every tag, and is an information hog. He doesn't document, he doesn't tell me anything, I've been here six months and still don't know half of what I need to know to do my job properly!
I'm expected to implement a new responsive design, but we don't have design specifications.
Cool, you'd think, new ideas, complete overhaul! Let's get a good foundation in bootstrap going!
WRONG! It needs to fit in with the old, fuck- ugly pre 2000 design.
Not because of any design constraints in particular, but because HE wants it that way. You know what was fucking trendy in 2000? Tables. Tables fucking everywhere. YOU KNOW WHAT TABLES ARE NOT? RESPONSIVE YOU FUCKING ICE LOLLY CHEWER!
We have no development timeline, no process management, no fucking project management. THE FUCKING PASSWORDS WERE STILL STORED IN PLAIN TEXT UNTIL LAST MONTH YOU IRRESPONSIBLE BANANA DEEPTHROATER! 😤😤😤😤😤😤
I'm doing my best here to get something resembling the old page, but there needs to be some fucking compromise! We are in fucking 2017, let's work with Bootstrap instead of against it, how about that you fucking bald cactus!
I know enough about UI to know that the way we're going, this is just going to be another unusable fucking clusterfuck.
YOU KNOW THE BEST FUCKING PART? I'M A FUCKING BACKEND DEV AND I WAS HIRED AS SUCH! GIVE ME A DESIGN TEMPLATE AND I'LL DO MY BEST TO IMPLEMENT IT, BUT FUCK YOU FOR EXPECTING FRONT END LEVEL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE YOU DUMB FUCKING SPAGHETTI!14 -
From a design meeting yesterday:
MyBoss: "The estimate hours seem low for a project of this size. Is everything accounted for?"
WebDev1: "Yes, we feel everything for the web site is accounted for."
-- ding ding...my spidey sense goes off
Me: "What about merchandising?"
MerchDevMgr: "Our estimate pushed the hours over what the stakeholders wanted to spend. Web department nixed it to get the proposal approved."
MyBoss: "WTF!? How the hell can this project go anywhere without merchandising entering the data!?"
WebDev2: "Its fine. We'll just get the data from merchandising and enter it by hand. It will only be temporary"
Me: "Temporary for who? Are you expecting developers to validate and maintain data?"
WebDev1: "It won't be a big deal."
MyBoss: "Yes it is! When the data is wrong, who are they going to blame!?"
WebDev1: "Oh, we didn't really think of that."
MerchDevMgr: "I did, but the CEO really wants this project completed, but the Web VPs would only accept half the hours estimated."
Me: "Then you don't do it. Period. Its better to do it right the first time than half-ass. How do think the CEO will react to finding out developers are responsible for the data entry?"
MerchDevMgr: "He would be pissed."
MyBoss: "I'm not signing off on this design. You can proceed without my approval., but I'll make a note on the document as to why. If you talk to Eric and Tom about the long term implications, they'll listen. At the end of the day, the MerchVPs are responsible to the CEO."
WebDev1: "OK, great. Now, the database, it should be SQLServer ..."
I checked out after that...daydreamed I was a viking.1 -
“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”
Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.
Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.
“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git
Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”
One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”
Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.
Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”
Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”
Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”
I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some. -
A few weeks ago I stepped onto the grounds of lovely Canada. Back then - coming from Europe - I was surprised. Free WiFi everywhere without all the bells and whistles of creating an account and such.
Well ... at least I thought so ...
Today I went to a location where they actually charge you for their wireless services - fair enough the coverage area is pretty huge - and provide you with an access coupon. All good my optimistic me told me but once the login page loaded...
There are a lot of things about UX I could rant about but let's put that aside. The coupon came from the office where they KNEW all your contact details but it required you to create an account with all of them again to redeem the coupon.
Not only that but it asked for things like the phone number - obviously asking for a Canadian landline number since hell who uses mobiles anyway with numbers longer than ten characters?! - and even though it had a nice country selection it kept the states field there even when selecting a country that doesn't have states ...
Oh, and on a regular phone screen (which would be the target user for WiFi on a campground I suppose) the input fields for state and zip were occluded by the margins of the input rendering the content invisible.
And if that weren't enough after creating your account they made you watch an ad as if the personal data and the 4$ you paid them wasn't enough for the lousy 400 KB/s you get for 24h ...
Gets better though! After creating the account they display your password to make sure you remembered it ... over a non-secured WiFi network ... and send you an email afterward ... password via unencrypted mail via an unencrypted WIRELESS connection ... not that it protects anything that would matter anyways you can just snoop the MAC of your neighbor and get in that way or for that sake get their password but oh well ...
Gosh, sometimes I just feel the urgent need to find the ones responsible and tell them to GTFO of the IT world ...
Is it just me feeling like this about crappy UI/UX design? Always wondering...2 -
C=consultant
M=Me
D=my Dumb boss
M: so how are you guys planning to implement the block all accounts feature?
C: oh it should be easy! We will just loop over every account and lock it!
M: what about implementing a flag that just blocks anyone from accessing the site till further notice?
C: what? I’m sure it’ll work. Just need a list of all accounts, we don’t need anything fancy!
M: what happens when we want to revert back to the pre-block state?
C: oh, so we will just unblock everybody
M: even people who were previously blocked for good reasons?
C: i guess so, unless you think otherwise
M: we r….
D: listen! We just need to be able to block all accounts, who cares about this details! So long as we block all accounts! We need this nuclear option in case something bad happens…
M: but what about when that bad thing passes and…
D: when it passes it passes who cares!
Arghhh so much rage here… like first at the stupid engineering design of looping over all of the accounts instead of using a simple flag. Like 1 http call (from one microservice to another) is a lot better than O(n)… not to mention, we won’t have to deal with failures and retries.
And second for my boss being a dumbass… ok you deal with being to afraid to unblock people after we used this “genius nuclear option”!6 -
This here is some source code that i made. And I'll admit, I was a bit frustrated at the time of making. I just started learning to code in HTML and CSS a coulpe days ago. And a friend asked if I could make him a website. So I told him that I barely know the basics yet. And he says that it doesn't matter just as long as he gets a website. So now, a couple days of tryhard coding later, he raged about how bad the site looked and that he himself could have done a better job than I did. And yet the entire site had over 300 lines of code in it (perhaps not very much for you hardcore coders out there, but a biiig step for me) and several subpages, all with custom error pages and all. Although I'll admit, the design was a fucking ugly as fuck since i can design about as good as an alligator flies. But man was I mad after that, haven't talked to him since. The bastard. But to he point, in my rage i made this. An outburst of anger that I later refactored to fit a large amount of devs (since I reckon 99% of programmers deal with clients/customers instead of friends). And if anyone has a spare dns space to put the code on, then help yourself.
The link is:
https://pastebin.com/aFcK10YK
Have a good day!8 -
So… I released v2.0.0 of devRant UWP a few weeks ago.
Then I got a lot of reports of problems on Windows 10 Mobile and older (than 1809) versions of Windows 10 on Desktop.
I decided to resubmit v2.0.0-beta16 to the store, and try to find the issue in the update… I didn't find it.
The code seems the same as the working version (at least the part I try to test is 100% equal).
So it seems I fucked up the vs project.
This means that to find the issue I can spend weeks to search it over and over inside the latest project (using shitty emulators of older Windows 10 builds to debug it), or I could just restore it to the old v2.0.0-beta16 (released in august) and implement again every single new feature and fix (something like 5 new features, dozens of improvements, changes and bug fixes).
In any case, this will require a lot of time (which I don't have at this moment).
I'm really sorry for this inconvenience, I know some of you use my client daily (~3.000 users I guess), I'm really glad someone likes it, and thanks a lot for the awesome reviews and feedback, but stable v2 (v2.1.0 at this point) will be available not earlier than in February.
Probably some of you have already download v2.0.0 while it was available in the store, and maybe it works on your device (please let me know in the comments below if you did, how is it going, and also if you like the new features and improvements).
After this epic fail, and more than 1 year (way too much) of v2 public beta, I want to throw the current project in the trash, and start it from scratch.
Which means I will start to work on v3 as soon as you will see v2.1.0 in the store, making it faster, lighter and with better support for the latest Windows 10 (Fluent Design and not) features, dropping the support for the very old UWP API.
Thanks for your attention.
Have a good day (or night)!
5 -
I've been lurking for a while but I had it up to here with these goddamned "js sucks" posts.
I'm not gonna deny js has severe design problems,
or that chromium is a motherfucking vampire
or that it's a goddamn pain in the ass to understand how to babel webpack + plugins correctly
that is all true.
the problem is that it's just a lazy damn circlejerk at this point where no learning is gained, with no outlook on any possible solution of these problems, let alone ANY type of actual collaboration to help the situation.
sometimes people don't even care to specify what is specifically wrong with js. It's just "js sucks" and that's it, farm ++.
slack is a ram hog, yes, yes, we know... WE KNOW.
every 5 days someone has to remind that!
is there any solution? why is it a ram hog? is electron the problem, or is the slack source code doing weird shit?
are there any lightweight alternatives to electron?
That's actual good conversation, but no, apparently it's impossible to drop the snarky tone for 2 seconds.
I think it's fine to point out defficiencies in applications, but it's not ok to shitpost on and on.
I would very ok with someone shitcomplaining about js is if they were doing something about it.
I'm still ok with people letting of some steam, I'm fine with people expressing frustration from direct work experience with js. I'm not ok with people and their ignorance and snarky comments and non helpfulness while comfortably laughing from their own camp of totally unrelated technologies.
Hearing sysadmins or people that code exclusively in c shit on js makes me feel my insides twirl.
Imagine I didn't do shit for linux, but I went around forums pointing out the defficiencies, like the lack of standards, and saying that mac is way better.
Or I if yapped on and on about openvpn and having an obscure as fuck api, meanwhile not doing a single fucking thing about it, or not even using it in a day to day basis.
do you hate slack's ram usage? me too and js isn't going anywhere in the next 5 years, so either do something or provide smart conversation, diagnosis of the problem or possible alternstives/solutions, otherwise stfu12 -
Worst: The guy gave me 5 minutes to code a given assignment on paper. I did all the logic and told him I was missing a function whose name I would just Google. He told me I can't always Google. Well... I won't be coding on paper either.
Best: I was given the assignment to clone a part of a production site. Assignment was intended for 3 days and I was given 5 hours. Completition wasn't important, only structure and coding style counted. I cloned everything and even added new features.
You just can't always be in the zone. I hope more interviewers would take that into account and design better questions.4 -
Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!
So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.
So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.
In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.
So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.
I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.
A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.
What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?
Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.
Don't enable bullshit people, run away!4 -
So this PR company hired my firm to convert their client's Wix website to WordPress to have better control over content and SEO, not to mention get away from the piss-poor "absolute position everything" setup of Wix. This is a single page design. 2 days later, we deliver it, performing faster than Wix and with a few extra goodies on the UI.
The client's director of IT wants to stay on Wix, because it's "the most secure provider", and will only move their ONE PAGE INFORMATIONAL WEBSITE to another platform and host if they answer a 133 item "security questionnaire". Short of SSNs, they want to basically know everything, including our proprietary and confidential security practices. You aren't Google...stop acting like you are...
How are people this stupid a "director" of anything?3 -
So, there was some project going around universities for online lab and connecting students to learn together. My school saw it as opportunity and I was appointed to make a simple web app doing just that.
T - teacher
First there was the database.
T1: "I think that you can design the tables better"
Me: "This is the most logical way, but sure, I can modify it. Although, T2 told me to do it this way."
T1: "Just do what I said"
And I did.
T2: "Why did you change the design, I gave you the schema, didn't I?"
Oh I was so fucking pissed. I'm skipping classes so I can work on this fucking piece of shit and this is what I get. Two self fucking centered idiots.
I resolved situation somehow, then came the frontend. I was told that the T3 will do it I just have to connect it to my backend, great.
So this so called "Teacher of Web design and development" downloaded fucking bloated bootstrap template with scripts longer than my future. It took 2 minutes to just load the html page from local drive.
I told T2 that I will make design it from scratch and I will try to make it look the same. I finished it somehow. Loaded in seconds, worked superb. First thing T1 told me: "Just roll back the design"
He didn't even listen to what I had to say.
Ohh boii, I fucking lost two months on your piece of shit garbage app, and what I have from it? Fucking bag of dicks. The thing is that I have another year with those pricks.
If this is what the industry is like, you guys deserve a medal.6 -
The commonly touted "best" experiences are when you just get told "wow, this code is amazing!"
I hate those code reviews.
The best ones are the ones where I get my code completely ripped apart by 10 different people in 10 different ways. Some of them might be amazing. Some of them might be arseholes thinking slating other people's code is how you climb the career ladder. But they all generally teach me something, and they all cause me to stop and think "hmm, have they got a point, or is my original design better?" The discussion that comes from those reviews is also often very interesting; and (when done well) the whole process can become somewhat of a teambuilding exercise for everyone involved.2 -
Which do you think designers are tired of hearing?
"Make the logo bigger"
"Looks great but can you make it pop"
"Can you make it pretty"
"Something is missing in the design but I'm not sure what is."
After 15 Revisions
"I think the first design you made was better."8 -
Story of my life when I am really interested in a company:
Company: let's have a call to get to know each other.
Me: okay.
Company during the call: takes a technical interview
Company *a few days later*: now let's have a technical call!
Me: okay
Company during call: asks to design GOOGLE in GOOGLE DOC (??!!?!)
Company *a few days later*: now let's have a Development Test!
Me: okay
Company *sends an email* asking to complete a task which should take a week to develop in a few hours
Me: okay...
Company *a few weeks later*: Sends a generic email saying they got another person who is a better fit.
Me: ffs..16 -
1 - I have this incredible software idea
2 - I start coding right away
3 - I get stuck because I don't know how to use some function and start googling
4 - I don't find a solution for the coding problem I had, but instead I find out that someone already made the brilliant software I was trying to make, with more use cases covered, better design and stuff.
5 - I remember the uncountable times this had happened before
6 - *goddammit*
7 - Think about making a tattoo that says "google it before coding it"3 -
!dev
So, I've been talking to this girl for a couple weeks now, and she fucking makes me happy guys. I kinda mentioned her once or twice on here, but I didn't really want to say much cause I wasn't sure how stuff was gonna go with her.
But basically now, we're just "talking" if that makes any sense to any of the younger, more social audiences here. For those who may not get what I mean, it's like we're not really looking for anyone else, but we're not really official or anything. Just somewhere in between like friends and dating (she confirmed this for me cause I've made assumptions before and got hurt so I wanted everything to be crystal clear)
I actually met her because she has a class with one of my friends. I mentioned their class in my contribution to the weekly rant this week, where the graphic design class was doing some basic webdev. I skipped my anatomy class to go there one day, started talking to her (actually the day of my rant where I said I'd been up for like ~30 hours or however many it was. LIKE EVERYTHING I POST ENDS UP REFERENCED IN ANOTHER POST), and just kept skipping mainly to see her. Then my friend gave me her Discord and we started actually talking to each other.
Within like 2 hours of us first messaging we had one of those like cute couple arguments. It was over who had prettier eyes, cause I have blue eyes (that people usually say are beautiful, I posted a couple pictures here once), and she has really pretty green eyes. I said that hers looked better, but she said that mine do....She won the argument.
Since then, it's just been fun and cute and I fucking love it. SHE EVEN SAID A PICKUP LINE TO ME A FEW NIGHTS AGO THAT I JUST LOVED. It was "your eyes are more gorgeous than any source code I have ever seen". She found it online, but like at the time, that really touched me.
I'm just so excited about all this guys. She's adorable and I love talking to her. The one thing that's KINDA weird is that she has the same name as my younger sister, but we call my sister a shortened version of the name, so it's not THAT weird.
And I'm just rambling at this point, like I generally do with my rants. She actually knows my profile name and everything (but she isn't on here, she does art, not computers), so she could possibly see this, but I'll likely end up sending it to her at some point anyways.7 -
NEW 6 Programming Language 2k16
1. Go
Golang Programming Language from Google
Let's start a list of six best new programming language and with Go or also known by the name of Golang, Go is an open source programming language and developed by three employees of Google and the launch in 2009, very cool just 3 people.
Go originated and developed from the popular programming languages such as C and Java, which offers the advantages of compact notation and aims to keep the code simple and easy to read / understand. Go language designers, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, revealed that the complexity of C ++ into their main motivation.
This simple programming language that we successfully completed the most tasks simply by librariesstandar luggage. Combining the speed of pemrogramandinamis languages such as Python and to handalan of C / C ++, Go be the best tools for building 'High Volume of distributed systems'.
You need to know also know, as expressed by the CTO Tokopedia namely Mas Leon, Tokopedia will switch to GO-lang as the main foundation of his system. Horrified not?
eh not watch? try deh see in the video below:
[Embedyt] http://youtube.com/watch/...]
2. Swift
Swift Programming Language from Apple
Apple launched a programming language Swift ago at WWDC 2014 as a successor to the Objective-C. Designed to be simple as it is, Swift focus on speed and security.
Furthermore, in December 2015, Swift Apple became open source under the Apache license. Since its launch, Swift won eye and the community is growing well and has become one of the programming languages 'hottest' in the world.
Learning Swift make sure you get a brighter future and provide the ability to develop applications for the iOS ecosystem Apple is so vast.
Also Read: What to do to become a full-stack Developer?
3. Rust
Rust Programming Language from Mozilla
Developed by Mozilla in 2014 and then, and in StackOverflow's 2016 survey to the developer, Rust was selected as the most preferred programming language.
Rust was developed as an alternative to C ++ for Mozilla itself, which is referred to as a programming language that focus on "performance, parallelisation, and memory safety".
Rust was created from scratch and implement a modern programming language design. Its own programming language supported very well by many developers out there and libraries.
4. Julia
Julia Programming Language
Julia programming language designed to help mathematicians and data scientist. Called "a complete high-level and dynamic programming solution for technical computing".
Julia is slowly but surely increasing in terms of users and the average growth doubles every nine months. In the future, she will be seen as one of the "most expensive skill" in the finance industry.
5. Hack
Hack Programming Language from Facebook
Hack is another programming language developed by Facebook in 2014.
Social networking giant Facebook Hack develop and gaungkan as the best of their success. Facebook even migrate the entire system developed with PHP to Hack
Facebook also released an open source version of the programming language as part of HHVM runtime platform.
6. Scala
Scala Programming Language
Scala programming termasukbahasa actually relatively long compared to other languages in our list now. While one view of this programming language is relatively difficult to learn, but from the time you invest to learn Scala will not end up sad and disappointing.
The features are so complex gives you the ability to perform better code structure and oriented performance. Based programming language OOP (Object oriented programming) and functional providing the ability to write code that is capable of evolving. Created with the goal to design a "better Java", Scala became one behasa programming that is so needed in large enterprises.3 -
Not necessarily on here, but Devs tend to bitch about designers and their lack of basic dev skills/understanding (talking about webdev). But when devs try to design it usually ends with a horrendous piece of visual garbage. Respect each others profession and the outcomes will be better. That's why Apple is now one of the most envied companies on the planet.8
-
“No it’s better this way, it’s an enterprise grade architecture design” - someone who was no idea how to build an app2
-
Ｈｅｌｌ Ｗｏｒｌｄ
So to followup with the enterprise grade goodness, I made a little prototype~
https://github.com/EnterpriseSoftwa...
Not very enterprise like yet, but a fun first 'extension' to writing a proper hello world program.
Ideas
--------
*Things that might make it more business like*
- Lots and lots of abstraction
- Tests ( not very business like but more stuff = better )
- FFI | Shared library, because why not
- Threading / workers
Hardcore:
Design a dedicated language for writing hello world programs that is compiled / interpreted on a simulated custom hello-world-cpu and displays it's content on a simulated screen.
Note
--------
I want to keep the documentation & code normal / actually helpful as a contrast to the concept itself and of course to keep my sanity.
24 -
Those weeks when you get calls from recruiters offering you up to four times your current salary.
I enjoy my job, love the atmosphere, team spirit, freedom (although sometimes there's a bit too much of this!), but I have a family and am saving to extend our house.
I don't want to let my team down, I'm the only programmer dev in a team of 3 (others do front end web design but not much JS), but sometimes I wonder if I should pursue one of these better offers...5 -
First time rant here, and I'm just gonna let fucking loose because this seems to be a good place for it.
My uni can't teach programming for shit. It's the reason people sign up for the course. They want to know how to program. I'm self-taught and unhappy in college as it is.
I joined CS because I thought they'd assimilate work in the real world, which is experience I need. I realized early on that programming is like art, and I love the rush I get of something finally working right.
That said, they sucked the fun out of it. It's too structured. Everyone trying to get the same goddamn result. In the real world, we'd be working on a larger project that involved planning, design, communication, teamwork, and the ability to complete each of our own pieces of the puzzle and subsequently put them together in a project that works for the end user.
I'm paying to be a fucking sheep, people. Why do employers give a shit about a degree instead of talent? Welp, fuck society for this. You can tell me I can drop it and still get a good job, it'll just be harder. That's the fucking problem. I can't get a job if these incompetent fucking bastards will throw out my resumé the moment they see "self-taught."
If we could hire based on GitHub contributions, I think many of us here would be relatively better off. Programmers program, not socialize. We do socialize, but in our own little groups. We team up as needed. The moment the jackass in HR realizes that, the better off we'll be.
Sorry, just the way I'm seeing shit right now. I'm going through some OCD-induced depression and this might be a result of that, but I'm passed the point of giving a fuck.15 -
Me and my manager throughout 2020
January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.
February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️
March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...
April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!
May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool
June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing
July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m
August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me
September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work
Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar
October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?4 -
If you like looking at language designers fight on Hacker News (and who doesn't?) go ahead and search for the V programming language or Vlang as it is also called and also for the posts that the creator of Odin lang has done in regards to V langs creator.
Its a shitstorm. Apparently both languages have been designed as alternatives to C (not as in "this will kill C!!" like rust does) and occasionally you will find some posts from the Zig language creator.
Fascinating fights actually, have been able to learn a thing or two about why some ideas concerning language design are whacky etc.
I am also trying to understand language design better, which is the main reason why I appreciate all of them fights.
10/10 best drama series I have seen thus far.11 -
It's starting again. I can feel it.
You had a decent job, but you had to think otherwise. Then you had to go to that coffee shop tell some people you're the fucking bee's knees, didn't you?
Well, you know that's how the band plays.
Yeah, but now you'll have to live up to the hype, my friend. And you know pretty well that the pocketknife on your belt won't cut it anymore.
I can always learn as I go...
Sure you can. Except this time stakes are higher. They'll be expecting you to deliver on all your bloody greatness. They'll be relying on you. Not only them, but also the person who chose to be with you. And you know you're not enough, for neither of them. Now you'll fuck it up and let all those people down.
But I could build things little by little, lay out a solid groundwork and build up from that. Just like that other time when...
Of course you can. But can you make beautiful sparkly things? Can you make them sexy?
No... But I can make them resilient. I can follow best practices and intelligent design patterns.
Right. Cause design patterns win contests and prizes. Sure.
Well, it'll make things work better. And then when someone else comes along...
They'll say your work smells and let everybody know how it should've been done, because they need to prove themselves. You know that's what people do.
But that's just not fair! Solid work is solid work!
And a fraud is still a fraud. And that's what you are.5 -
Let me just get right down to it.
FUCK YOU Hewlett-fucking-Packard FOR YOUR SHITTY LAPTOPS! Don't you even keep your customer's needs in mind when you design these things? Besides all the bloatware you stuff into the Windows you ship it with, at least make the quality of your shit better. These flimsy screens and loose hinges, I've had to get that shit replaced multiple times in just the past year.
Want to upgrade to an SSD or plug in more RAM? Guess what! I've to tear the whole thing apart! Keyboard, palm rest, all if it! What even happened to just popping a cover at the bottom to swap out the hard drive!? I have to fucking congratulate you, you fucking cunts, for making an easy process as difficult as it can fuckin possibly get. You guys deserve an award for this, preferably presented to you, shoved up your asses.10 -
Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).
1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.
I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.14 -
I love materializecss.com .. I love the concept and I don't know why, but I like it ways better than bootstrap. Materialize looks kinda fresh to me - not the classic Material Design. Aaaaaand it's very easy to work with it.5
-
Rant!
Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.
Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!3 -
Working with a client on his "superior idea" and suddenly this happens: (longer rant)
tl;dr;
Client wanted me to move a div by 3 millimetres to the left and blamed me for not being capable of doing so while giving him a nonsense about different resolutions and screen sizes. (Use a ruler, DUH)
Me: Here's the updated design layout as our designer specified.
Him: Looks good but it needs to be moved 3 millimetres to the left
Me: *Confused as hell* - Wait, did you just said 3 millimetres?
Him: Yes, is that a problem for you?
Me: *Amazed* Well, yes, you see, we don't measure in millimetres. We use pixels.
Him: Ahh, can't you do anything right!? Why do I have to deal with your nonsense of telling me that this is not impossible? Just take your god damn ruler and put it on your screen, then move it 3 millimetres to the left.
Me: You do realise that every person has a different size/resolution monitor so it won't work?
Him: I don't care. Just do your god damn job or i'll find someone else to do it.
*
Story continued in such manner - we spent an hour on skype moving the stupid <div> around until it hit his 3 millimetres mark.
*
His: See, you could do it.
Me: *Sends him screenshot of my own screen (his was 1024x768, mine 1920x1080) where page is broken and not aligned*
Him: Oh come on, you break every god damn thing. You are the worst. I'm going to find a better one. *hangs skype call*
Him: *3 days later* Hi, so, umm, I've talked to other developers and they said it's impossible to measure in millimetres. Can you revert those changes we did?
After all this I've fully realised that this person is sits at computer very rarely and does not how it even works...5 -
Why are people complaining about debugging?
Oooh it’s so hard.
It’s so boring.
Can someone do this for me?
I honestly enjoy debugging and you should too..
if it’s not your code, you’ll get to understand the code better than the actual author. You’ll notice design improvements and that some of the code is not even needed. YOU LEARN!
If it’s your own code (I especially enjoy debugging my own code): it forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective. It makes you aware of potential other bugs your current solution might cause. Again, it makes you aware of flaws in the design. YOU LEARN!
And in either case, if it’s a tricky case, you’ll most likely stop debugging at some point, refactor the shit out of some 50-100 line methods and modulize it because the original code was undebuggable (<- made up a new word there) and continue debugging after that.
So many things I know, I know only because I spend days, sometimes even weeks debugging a piece code to find the fucking problem.
My main language is java and i wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me there’s a memory leak in my code. I mean, it’s java, right? We refactored the code and everything worked fine again. But I debugged the old version anyway and found bugs in Java (java 6.xx I believe?) which made me aware of the fact that languages have flaws as well.. GC has its flaws as well. So does docker and any other software..
Stop complaining, get on your ass and debug the shit out of your bugs instead of just writing it in a different way and being glad that it fixed the issue..
My opinion.3 -
Only if people understood the amount of effort that goes behind building a simple app.
Even if it's a simple notes app, I've to design the UI (at least 2 different activities - 1 for the list and the other for editing notes), write the code which makes it run i.e. without which the app is just a piece of empty design, think about what data
structures to use (that notes you are saving need to be stored somehow) and then club everything together and hope nothing breaks (spoiler alert: something will definitely break).
People need to understand that it's not just putting some fancy buttons and boxes around. Also, I'm not just making the app for one device. I've to make sure it works on different screen sizes, different versions of the OS (a user can't imagine how many functions need to be re written because something got deprecated in the process and I'd to switch to something different).
Also I'm not just sitting at my computer and converting coffee to code. I've to think about the flow, structure, design, navigation, backend etc. Of the app; most of my time isn't spent writing code but thinking/studying how to write the code. I also need to wait while the project is compiling/building every time I want to test it.
A function which you think is hard to implement night be really easy while something you claim is easy might be a nightmare. Oh and I didn't even mention how I need to stick to some design guidelines to make the app look consistent with the rest of the OS.
If you're wondering why a developer is spending most of his time on a browser, he isn't playing internet games or browsing reddit ( at least you better hope not), he's probably looking at the docs/stack overflow to get something to work/fix something!
Wow! That was long. Thanks!3 -
Start-ups and corporations trying new things be like:
"Why should we pay a developer or a company to develop this and this for us when we can just:
- start a competition.
- get free design mockups and code.
- decide which is better.
- reward a small prize and maybe some freebies to the competitors.
- profit. FREE CHEAP CODE AND DESIGNS!!!"
It might be the reasonable and logical thing to do from a business standpoint if its about code you need to rarely maintain..
But from an independent developer viewpoint - FUCK YOU AND THE SLOW ENSLAVEMENT OF MY SPECIE!!!3 -
The fact that I have to convert a 90s-ish design into a WordPress theme despite the boss trying to convince our client that WP's shit and we should do it in something else doesn't tilt me as much as it should.
But what DOES tilt me and piss me off is the fact that the shitheads told us to 'make the design better', and so I tried; I made one of their graphics responsive by only designing it with CSS (and for once, I even made it work right) because they wanted a mobile-friendly version but failed to supply a mobile-version PSD so I had to improvise and they had the balls to tell my boss that they're 'disappointed that we failed to follow the guidelines'.
Did you bitchsicles even bother to hire a proper fucking designer who would know how to fucking design a PSD to convert into HTML? There's no fucking grid, the design's all over the fucking place like your mother after a Viagra-fueled Friday night bukakke party at an old home and the colors are an eyesore like your own fucking selves if you ever bothered looking in the fucking mirror. Fuck you all to hell.1 -
The design process.
Call me old fashioned - but clean-code/clean-architecture/SOLID is not as important as simplicity and coherence.
I JUST NEED FUNCTION THAT DOES STUFF! But noooooo better overly design EVERYTHING!4 -
F*CK...that feeling when you were working as a junior UI/UX designer for about 3 weeks in new company, you were on a project which is almost finished and delivered...
1 and half week Later (after technical issues - check my older rants)......
you have noticed one quite importat mistake in the designs, which were done by senior designers, which can lead in future to a huge Ux problems - so huge, that users will probably leave/close the app and will not purchase the product via that app... ( We can say than whole design solution was a waste of money for the client)... On that designes was working a team of 4 people, about 3 Months (and the app (prototype) had to be ready already 2 Months back)...
the deadline was pushed 2x already...
And your boss (senior designer) tell you that this is not such an issue.. But thx for your opinion.....
1 week Later by user testing 4 out of 4 people were asking about that stuff I told to my boss that is missing...
And I was ignored...
In less than 1 week Later after the testing I get fired from the company without no reason...
Or better - the reason was:
I have too little experiences for this job...
Dont know if I should laugh or cry🤦♀️🤣/😭8 -
The worst architecture I've seen is WordPress.
How can you be so drunk to design such a filthy mess?
In some way PHP might be to blame. Its API is a fucking mess as well and may have stirred WP developers in this puke around so they couldn't come up with a better CMS architecture.
Don't get me wrong. I do love PHP. But only in it's OO form with namespaces and type hints and composer dependencies.
I've seen enough of PHP functional programming and it still haunts me.7 -
If you're making a game, dont start by thinking about your inventory system. Start by thinking about what you want your player to be able to DO, the cost of those things, and the constraints.
For example, ages of empires didnt have you worrying about unit equipment at all. every villager could do almost any job. while survival games, especially survival horror, like the recent RE remake, severly restrict inventory and stack sizes to make resource managenent more important.
Games like Fallout had list based inventories because lists are cheap, and it allowed a tighter interaction loop. players would loot. go into inventory. close container, onto the next container, keeping the player in the exploration loop longer. neoscav did the opposite *for effect* harkening back to diablo, but taken to the nth degree: *everything*, actions, combat, exploration, character design, all based on an inventory-style grid.
while games like rimworld and dwarf fortress have your inventory represented by zones where items are physically *stored* in stacks on the ground, extending the concept of base management to resource management through physical layout and build optimization.
its important to think about what kind of actions you want players to be able to do, and the kinds of challenges and constraints you want on them at each point of the game and each mechanic they engage in.
other examples, though terrible, include fortnite, where the limitations of competitive play had inventory limited to a resource system and a hotbar. while earlier battle royale and sandboxs games like rust and battleground induced tension by combining loot mechanics and grid inventories with the constant danger of competing players, allowing them to have richer inventory systems at the risk of frusterating players who frequently died while managing their inventory. meanwhile in overwatch, notice how the HUD changes to best represent the abilities of each character.
all in all it is better to stop thinking of inventory systems as a means to an end, and instead as the end representation of desired mechanics, or artificially selected representations for particular effects.
this applies likewise to ui and ux in general. because the design of interface is fundementally about the design of *interactions*, and what you want to enable a user or customer to *do* will ultimately drive those interactions.6 -
My team lead be like when we're in a meeting with the boss:
He: I'll have a working session with her, we'll brainstorm on how to come up with a better design and improve such and such feature, once that's done, we would call you to have another meeting.
Boss: sounds good, I'm looking forward to it.
Me: *internally rolls eyes...*
He: thank you everyone.
.
*meeting done*
.
.
.
couple of minutes later, I get a message from him:
He: hey, it turns out I'm busy and I can't have that session with you, do come up with a new idea/design and share it with me.
Me: .... *fuck you, like you didn't know you were busy before making that fake promise*
.
.
.
The fucker will take credit again for things he didn't do.8 -
So you warn the agency that the client is going to eat into the Dev time with their constant design change requests. Warned them repeatedly for a good month, I should add, asking them to better manage the client's expectations and push back for a later launch date. Come time for development and they act all surprised that we can't build the entire site, that we outlined in the timeline will take 4 to 5 weeks of Dev time, in less than 2 weeks!! ... It gets worse! They say the client is happy to compromise as long as we launch "something" by this date. We list out what can be done, and the fact that there's no time for the client to do QC and we won't be able to do a full QA phase on the site until after launch and only when we finalise all the features. Agency says client agrees and within 3 days into development, they want to QC the site and add more features....... still wanting all this in 2 weeks. This site has now been in development for 3 months.1
-
Nice! At least we have plenty of advance notice with which to plan. Design could be a little better, maybe.
2 -
It's still in development. It often says the opposite from what is expected. Try Retoor1b chatbot at https://llm.molodetz.nl
This was result after building bot + chat website from scratch including training with embeddings. Design is generated by GPT, I tried my own but all ugly.
It's quite cool huh? Ask it to write some code for you. It's absolutely terrible. If it's down, try again in 5 minutes. I'm still working on it.
What's the result? I finally have a toolkit to make good/serious bots. Code could be bit better, but that's for other day.
Stack: self written webserver (and yes, you can post a gb to it or ddos it. Not sure if it survives the first one. I should limit requests to one mb anyway. Http headers may officially not be more than 4096 in total) since I know http protocol from my head anyway. Python websockets module. Asyncio, chromadb.
It could have xss issues. Don't care.
Let me know what you think
42 -
A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.
In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.
Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.
But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.
Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.
I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.
Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.11 -
You know, one of my fav ranters constantly shits on one of my main languages :P which is Java. But shit I would lie if I said that I have not learned something from what he has to say. Truth be told I am aware of the pitfalls and bad design decissions of a lot of my favorite langs: Python, PHP, JS, Java, Go etc. And I think it is benefitial to everyone to understand the things that our fav stacks fail at doing in order to become better devs.
So lets give a round of applause to those angry mofockas that make us see the shit that is wrong with what we use and learn more from each other.3 -
Update: https://devrant.com/rants/4676421/...
I told you all. I fucking told you. Nobody listened to me.
Good people just leave.
This dude who I look upto and is kind of my mentor in the org and has spent a decade here, just resigned.
What the fuck!!!!
And with that, the attrition in product team is insanely high, to the point that it's scary.
My manager is not responsive and is often reactive instead of being proactive.
While the leadership is super excited about the product and everyone says they are hiring more and more people in product team, the design says our product is not a priority for them and we are just left with one design resource.
I was conversing with my colleague and we both are super scared that they shouldn't scrap the product and fire us.
This seems unlikely with all the logical calculations that we did but in a capitalist system we have to be prepared for anything.
I am shit scared right now because there is no clarity on what could happen next.
On the other hand, my skip level manager is taking a lot of interest in my work and is working very closely with me and taking more ownership of our product than my direct manager.
Everyone says our product is a top priority and tech is super agressive about it.
One thing that could happen is my manager leaving and not telling us about it upfront.
In which we would just report to our skip level manager and growth chances would be even better.
But at this stage, this seems super scary to me.3 -
Recently I've had some Airpod knockoffs in the mail for about €8 while they were in a promotion. They are pretty usable, and while I do not own the authentic Airpods, my unit seems to have all its most important functions that I'd expect of a pair of Bluetooth earbuds (given that I've been using those since 2015 already, so plenty of experience with such things). Given that, the Apple Airpods'd better give me a morning blowjob for their price!
Seriously, what is the point of such Apple earbuds. For me, the important thing is that they are wireless earbuds that can operate independently or in sync as desired. It's earbuds that can be recharged on the go using some kind of portable 3.7V lithium cell in a charging dock that can directly drive the 3.7V cells in the earbuds. That's all.
Bill of materials? 2 tiny Bluetooth controllers, 2 speaker drivers, ABS injection moulding for the charger pocket thingy and the earbuds themselves, a charge controller for the "docking station", and some tiny lithium cells for each, provisioning size-capacity for whatever will still fit. That's all.
Is that worth €150? Like hell it is. And sure some capacitive sensor in the earbud for touch-based control would be useful. But guess what, even that isn't expensive! Capacitive sensing is dirt easy (https://youtu.be/mWR9Q_pTagw), and for something like the Airpods you could probably get away with 3-4 stationary capacitive touch sensor modules. Cost of that per unit if I were to design it and outsource it to China? €15 at best. Yet Apple charges €150-something for their Airpods. What the fuck?!7 -
I fucking hate the design and aesthetics of PC gaming hardware in general. Who the fuck do they design those things for, edgy teenagers? Give me something that looks well built and professional, damnit. Heck, most console designs are much better.12
-
I can agree to shit when presented with hardcore data, data that proves me otherwise. But when people go by opinions and then hold is a truth because of "many feel the same way" I cannot help but to giggle a bit.
Most issues I have found with programming stacks come from opinions rather than hard presented data, if a bunch of people dislike a tool, but it delivers, I get to differ two things: (1) it is bad but it performs as needed, but it is bad because of design problems etc, (2) some dude made a post concerning why he things is bad and sheep mentality follows.
If technologies were without merit, then we would have all discarded C++ a long time ago cuz Linus disliked it, a powerful programmer indeed, but a FOCUSED one, meaning, one that deals with 1 domain (kernel development)
Do I care about what Linus things about web development? No, lol, he is a better kernel developer than I am, but I highly, grossly doubt that he knows enough about web development to give me something to think about.
all languages have faults, regardless of what point of view we look at them, but completely disregarding a tech stack because of shit that you saw some fucktard wrote about, benefits and otherwise, just seems....well...sheepish, there might very well be a tech stack out there that covers everything, to me it is a mixture of things, and I use them as I please and feel like, but this is because after years of learning I have read about quirks and pitfalls and how to avoid them. I would suggest you all do the same, by you all I mean those of high opinions that can't be deflected.
This field is far too wide and concentrated to go head and think about absolutes when even the fundamental mathematical theory concerning computer science is not absolute whatsoever, it is akin to magic, shit works, but it might not, the incantation might be right, but circuits and electricity have a way of telling us to go fuck ourselves, so do architectures, specifically ones based on physics.3 -
Why people like Google pixel
Worst design
No waterproofing
No wireless charging
No dual camera stuff
And now no headphones jack 😐😕
Samsung galaxy S8
And LG V30 Is far better choice4 -
It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)
So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.
It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).
And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....
All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...
Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.12 -
!rant
Medium long story about POP!_OS
TL;DR : A true K.I.S.S. OS. Very well designed UI. In general suitable for everyone. Any distro-hoppers MUST try out. If your current OS is already heavily customized to your needs, DON'T bother with POP. (Read till the end if you are on toilet, nothing to lose)
Backstory : I am never a fanboy of anything although I am loyal to the tools I use daily. So OS is also something I picked and use to meet my needs except when I was a student. My first linux experience was about a decade ago with ubuntu. Have tried almost all kinds of light-weight and minimal distros after that (lubuntu, arch, mint, puppylinux, fedora, centos and others I forgot) during my student years.
I like all things minimal. ("Keep It Simple Stupid" is my email signature.) When I started working, Windows became the sole OS I use since it met my needs better than others. Except that one time when I tried Elementary. Although I found it a good OS, it didn't get installed as a dual-boot. I don't find Elementary minimal. It is one of well designed OSs but I still think it can be improved. (Plus I had this weird feeling that it is similar to Mac OS)
At the start of this year, Widows alone was not enough for my needs. Decided to look for a minimal linux distro. My old i7 ASUS has 8GB RAM and roughly 250GB free storage. So I am not that worried about hardware requirements. My main struggle is downloading stuffs. (Few of you guys must know by now the speed of my internet LOL.) Well, even if I had a good speed, I will still look for minimal distro as first priority. So I went with minimal ubuntu image and xubuntu environment. Although I do not like the UI design, it is acceptable. Through out the years, I have configured it to suit my needs and currently pretty happy with it.
Thoughts on POP!_OS : To me, it is literally like meeting a young girl who is perfect for my life. She has the perfect body, beautiful face, amazing appearance and good manners. And she is young, of course there is a lack of experience issue. But it can be taught and she has a very high chance to become a wonderful lady if she continues like this. Only crap is I already have someone and in a committed relationship. So I could not go any further than introduction. I do save her contact and will keep in touch with her online. You know? Things change. Things always change somehow.2 -
I thought of posting this as a comment to @12bit float' post, but then decided it better goes out as a post by itself.
https://devrant.com/rants/5291843/...
My second employer, where I am on my last week of notice currently, is building a no code/low code tool.
Since this was my first job switch, I was in a dreamy phase and was super excited about this whole space. I indeed got to learn like crazy.
Upon joining, I realised that an ideal user persona for this product was a developer. Wow! No code tool for developer. sO cOoL...
We started building it and as obvious as it could get, the initial goal was adoption because we were still at top of the funnel.
We launched an alpha release shortly followed by a beta.
Nobody used it. Tech XLT/LT kept pushing product and design team to run a feature factory so that their teams can use this tool.
The culture set by those two leaders was toxic as fuck.
Now, I decided to do some research and some more product discovery to understand why folks were not using it. Mind you, we were not allowed to do any research and were forced to build based on opinions of those two monkeys.
Turns out that the devs were really happy with their existing tools and our tool was another tool being forcefully added into their toolbox by the said XLT/LT.
Not only that, even if they decide to use our tool, out of pressure, they still cannot because the product was missing key capabilities like audit control and promotion from one environment to another.
Building those would essentially mean reinventing Github aka version control and Spinnaker aka CI/CD pipeline.
My new boss (I got 3 managers in 4 months because of high attrition across levels due to the toxic culture), thinks that tech XLT/LT are doing great and we all suck as a product and design team.
He started driving things his own way without even understanding or settling down for first 90 days.
Lol, I put in my resignation got out of that mess.
So agreeing to what our boy said here, no code tools are a complete waste, especially for a developer, and even as a non tech person, I prefer keyboard over mouse.2 -
!rant
So, Rust again.
When I learned that Rust doesn’t support inheritance, only traits (interfaces), I was shocked at first.
Then I tried to remember when the last time was that I have used inheritance in the code that I write (not the code that I use).
And I could remember an instance some months ago. But I also remember that I was very unsatisfied with that design and refactored it to use composition instead. And it was much better.
One of Rust’s properties is that many good practices in other programming languages are enforced rules in Rust.
And in case of inheritance, it seems like Rust decided that composition over inheritance is such a good practice that it should be a rule.
I’m not 100% convinced that there never will be cases where inheritance is better. But I still like this radical idea of forcing the devs to do it "the right way" in the majority of (if not all) cases.
I think many devs will disagree.
What do you think?14 -
There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):
John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.
Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.
Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.
Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.
Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.
Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.
Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.
Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.
Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!9 -
Here we go....
At our school we had different industry people come in and talk about whatever they want to.
My last presenation for the day is on 3D modelling in Game Design, and of course we have middle school kids being generally loud and obnoxious.
Some fuckers are being exceptionally obnoxious, and the teachers decided, in their infinite FUCKING wisdom, to stick them in front of a table where Juniors and Seniors are sitting, minding our own buisness.
Of course, the fuckers decided to continue being obnoxious and despite my request to keep it down, and another Senior's direct approach to tell them to shut up, they continue being disruptive.
At one point, a teacher, again using INFINITE FUCKING WISDOM, decided that instead of removing the fuckers from the room, put a Senior in between them, hoping that that would somehow keep them quiet. Yes, the fucking preschool level attempt didn't work.
Eventually a teacher concluded that the fuckers were pissing us off and removed them from the room. Thank fuck.
That feels much better, excuse me as I need to reinstall an OS on my desktop since the Universe seems to fucking hate me today. -
So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.
I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.
I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?
Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.
However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.
I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.
6 -
Rant
I'm tired of this shit!!!
First I receive a task to create a new functionality for the app that I'm working on and some documentation (this is the only good part of all the rant) but no design.
It's been 2 weeks since I got assigned to this and still no design, no assets, no API calls that ACTUALLY WORK.
Today was testing a plist to get a banner link, and for 1 hour that little fucker didn't returned the image I was asking.
Better, I wasn't getting ANY IMAGE. Turns out that the link sends me to a HTML URL that doesn't have any image... go figure!
So I've been working on this from some images inside the PDF with the documentation given.
Oh! Wait! There's more!
The cherry on top is that I'm implementing a chat/voice call/video call into the app and the framework that I will be using is being created now, and it's not even finished!!!!!!4 -
Going through site after senior dev asked front end dev to go through it and tweak it for design and better responsiveness(he and I are back end oriented and have no design skillz).
Things are breaking visually on almost all devices.
Client sends an email saying it suddenly looks terrible on mobile and wants to know what happened. I let him know we were actively working on things and it should be good in a few minutes.
Looking over CSS...there are "!important" tags EVERYWHERE, media queries are in the wrong order and have "!important" attached to almost everything so the largest screen size settings win.
Why do I even bother?2 -
My first dev job is my current job, but I'm leaving it tomorrow to go on on an internship overseas, then return my focus to completing my Computer Science bachelor's degree and getting into a Master's program.
Before this job, I was an office assistant at a small company that sold cosmetics products and fragrances. I had just returned to college after a 1.5 year hiatus and was tired of that job. I wanted to get into the field, even though my experience was limited to freelance web design and a few personal programming projects of which I no longer had any proof, and I still didn't have a degree, but I wasn't confident that someone would contact me. Yet I decided to update my resume and upload it to Indeed.com. I was already getting interviewed at a call center when this local tech startup called, and 2 weeks later, I had the job. We were 3 employees and I was, not only the first woman in the team, but also the first person to ever get hired by the directors without a college degree. Today, I still hold those two titles and the team is 3 times bigger.
It was a very bumpy ride, and tomorrow I move on to other adventures, but I'll always be grateful for the opportunity, all the lessons, and the best team mates I could ever have. Without their wisdom and guidance, I wouldn't have half the blessings I have today. I will miss them dearly, but I know we'll stay friends.
Here's to better things and to a college degree! <32 -
Love the topic, and I have multiple.
We were designing a frontend for a new application and we were using University lingo for the text placeholders. I forgot to remove one section in which the text stated "You are looking to enroll in the University of Deez Nuts", on another section I left "Click here cuh". Our manager at the time liked the design so much, but forgot to check for spelling or texts and as such sent the demo to our entire department. Everyone saw it, and while they all found it funny it could have seriously gone wrong. Thankfully our department VP had a pretty good sense of humor.....dude also knew exactly who it was from the start.
On another application, a director, who is a friend, asked for multiple items on a request form, during testing, I added text in Spanish (I am in Texas, but Spanish is pretty well known and spoken in the state) saying "Que bien chinga <Name of the Director>" which roughly translates to "<Name of the Director> is being annoyong" (but in a very Mexican spanish way)
I neglected to consider that the dude was probably viewing the admin board and checking the items as they were being added to the system and he called me not even 3 minutes later saying "You know I can see what you add right??"
All in all, I was pretty lucky because in any other places I would have been severely reprimanded :P
There are many more, but these came at the top of my head as the better ones. -
I. HATE. DELL. WITH. MY. GUTS.
Their low tiers products are full black plastic overpriced fuckshit, if you press too much the cover you can actually destroy your display. Fuck shitty laptops and fuck this shitty laptop in particular. It's slow. It's so slooooooow. It's everflying fucking slow motion, being on the web is like being in the matrix while dodging bullets made of wordpress plugins. The only good thing I can say is that is living right now, it has been... Three years? I only picked it because of high discount and ubuntu preinstalled (that made me think: oh, maybe they have components that are linux compatible regardless of distros. It was not). I'm enjoying Manjaro, when I'll have the skillz i'm going full Arch.
I will start university this fall. It's going to be a math major. I absolutely need something better than this anyway. I am also freaking out because I don't know which genre of software they could want to make me install and if they're windows/mac only. In the meanwhile I do photography, video, design and as you may suppose Adobe is often my go-to; I also have to build a workstation at home. I am freaking out because WELL FUCK WINDOWS 10 AND ITS PRIVACY NIGHTMARE PERIOD.
Which laptop I buy?
How well does heavy software run in a Windows virtual machine (on the desktop, not the laptop)?10 -
PM wrote a really high-level requirement doc and asked me about estimates.
Me: Well, functionality-wise it will take 4-5 days provided the design is ready.
PM: Our designers are really full on schedule; Just do it! Expand your creativity. I believe in your taste of UX
Me: Listen, the implemented design will take much more time to change if we go back and forth. It's better to revise on the designer's screen.
PM: Oh don't be so modest! I trust you already. Just focus on the functionality, get it done first. For the design we'll talk about it later. Move fast and break things!
Me: ..Sigh. This is gonna end up badly.6 -
I've always liked Windows more than MacOS, but known deep in my heart that MacOS is more polished. More shiny, attractive, makes more sense, is easier to use, etc. Windows was never that far behind (however, they were probably furthest behind in Vista and 8), but they were always behind.
Looking at the new MacOS, I genuinely think that Microsoft offers a better experience now. While Android and iOS are still firmly battling, Windows just beats the living shit out of MacOS.
Windows is an OS built for either touch or mouse. If you use touch controls, the OS automatically adapts to it (larger context menus if you press and hold, smaller ones if you right click). You can enter tablet mode. The start menu has a good interface for both touch and mouse.
MacOS is an operating system designed for touch input on a device which famously has none.
It has fallen victim to a very common design error: too much fucking spacing. Every little thing, even items in a list, has a ton of pixels between them, and they all have rounded corners. Again, this is common for touch displays where you don't wanna fat finger stuff. But they don't offer a touch screen Mac and have expressed no interest in ever doing so.
Now they're going ARM on custom silicon. This is a good move in the long run, but it's going to be a rough couple of years. Apple admits two. You can probably reliably double that.
Is Apple killing the Mac on purpose or by accident?5 -
Android development sucks assssssssssss.
They FINALLY made a design system that doesn't look ugly so I thought might as well upgrade my old apps to it.
Publish and tonnnnes of crashes hours after launch.
Test on older devices and turns out some @color/material_xyz was missing in a lower API code BUT available in higher ones? No fallback, no error in AndroidStudio, just a runtime crash. Amazing
Then the location permissions glitch up. On lower androids even if you aren't actively tracking the user, the system tries to call some method which if you haven't overridden, the app crashes at launch.
And no amount of wrapping in try-catch-ignore helps (https://stackoverflow.com/questions... helped)
OH AND THEN the above solution if used on latest Android code33, CRASHES ON RUNTIME. so more sets of 'if VCODE this then ask this else that' bullshit.
I don't even need location it's just for better ad money ffs.
I've been team-android since Froyo and hate apple's monopoly, but if this is the level of their competence, many will jump ship sooner or later.
PS: yes I know I should've checked for lower versions before hand but Im not gonna make 8 android VMs to test all when different things fail in different versions.
I did have to do that in the end, but for a meh pet project one shouldn't have to. The system should have enough fallbacks and graceful fails.3 -
I fucking hate design agencies and everything related to fucking design!
Today we received an email from design agency asking us to put two images next to each other so that they can compare and see which one fucking fit better!
What is the difference between these two images:
first one has 28points of text size while the other one has 26 points ...
one more reason to hate this fucked up world!4 -
I always thought programming was not for me, simply because I'm not really good at math. I studied graphic design, but switched to an education called Interactive Multimedia Design, which teaches a combination of webdevelopment and -design. At first, I thought I'd love the design part more, and would really struggle with development, but it turned out that I was a natural; I wrote my first Java program and I fell in love with programming. 6 years later I'm a happy full stack JS developer, rarely doing any graphic work anymore. I do have a soft spot for UX still, but that only makes me better at what I do on a daily basis, imho.
-
It's not that big of a deal, but it's kinda embarrassing since I was one of the best students in the class.
Took a web design (HTML, CSS & a tiny bit of JS) class. I never really struggled; more like polished everything I already knew to become a bit better.
In class working on an assignment. So we have a folder dedicated on a server just for this class. The folder is accessible as long as you're on the school internet or using the VPN. So I have an assignment there. I drop it onto my desktop, because i had worked on it since the last time I was at this computer.
I opened the project in VSCode and begin making changing things. I opened the HTML file wasn't updating. "That's odd" I thought. Cleared the cache, opened and closed the browser. Still nothing. I called the professor over to see if had any clue what was going on.
My dumbass self was editing the file that was on my desktop, but I had opened the HTML file from the server. I felt so stupid but we both just laughed it off and went on. -
Rails. Fucking rails...
God damn monoliths, built by a cowboy coder.
Every one I have ever worked with becomes (or already is) a house of fucking cards that will blow over at the slightest gust of wind.
The worst part is that you always hear the same justifications from rails developers, then after they convince the higher-ups that “we will build it right, not like those other monoliths” we find ourselves F’ed right in the A a few months later.
It’s this frustration that lead me to MUCH better paradigms like Microservices, Event-Sourcing, CQRS, Domain Driven Design and the like.
When someone says “our backend is in rails” my first response is “so when are you replacing it?”8 -
I don't scream because my teams are in a different country and we communicate by IM and email.
I do write long ranting/passive-aggressive emails or type really quick replies when I'm pissed though. .
An example of the latter:
Boss: I need you to make a "quick" fix...
Me: hmm ok sounds like we should implement it like ...
Boss: I was thinking something like this... since it's a temp fix
Need: (typing faster) why is it a temp fix... why not builds it properly so it can be reused
Boss: but that takes time, this is quicker
Me: it's bad design because ... (Typing so fast I'm making typos)... Anyway I can do it. This is better...
Boss: ... ok fine... if you can finish it before deadline6 -
Several years ago, I heard from a friend who was doing assignments for students on the side. Quite a hustle. His story began when he wanted to figure out why can't these students be able to draw their own database tables, relationships, UML, etc. That's what school has to be teaching them and then he was told that they were learning through MS Access. He goes and tell me that even though this is a lame way of teaching database design, its definitely easier to explain through hands-on and less typing mistakes, as according to the lecturer he met. Making the explanation more visually appealing and helpful for understanding.
OK I get it, but somehow that taught them the wrong way of database design from the beginning. I'd prefer getting them to start writing SQL commands from day 1 and play em at some DB VM. Keep em as real as it gets.
Now I have my own students asking for help in their assignment and also asked for tutoring lessons in web development. So I gave them the crash course in HTML, CSS and Javascript. I've asked them if they've used anything of what I taught them in school. They go and tell me that they've been taught web development through Wordpress. Oh WTF!? I havn't talked to their lecturer yet but it better be a really good explanation to teach these youngsters in a flawed and bloated PHP CMS framework for "web development".2 -
My dev Goals:
- Write better code commenting more.
- Create my first Open Source Project and publish it on GitHub.
- Improve my design skills.1 -
Moral of the story: sometimes you've got to take a hit to be better off in the end.
A client asked me to design flyers for him, at first I was hesitant since this would be a stand alone design task instead of one incorporated with development.
He kept asking since he liked what I designed for my other clients (logos, etc..) So I finally said yes and we agreed to a final preview before he would pay me. I had asked him for color schemes, certain pictures, info, etc. but he told me it was completely up to me.
I finished the design, sent him the preview and he told me it was shit compared to my other work and that he didn't want it anymore 😅. I used to get mad as fuck every time this happened but now I don't even bother .
I know many people are going to say "You should have had him sign a contract, bla bla". I know, I know, but you can't let people sign a contract for every small thing, it completely depend on the situation and I prefer to know which of my lesser known clients are assholes so I can quit accepting tasks from them. This saves me much more time in the end. -
It is 4 am now.
There it is. My obsession to destroy electronical things got me once again lol. I found a Canon printer last month and put it in my room to gather more electronical parts (for future arduino projects).
I am quite impressed about what makes Canon printers so different from Epson printers.
Canon really makes it fucking hard to open the inside of the printer.
Epson printers were way easier to open. A big plus for Epson.
Canon printers have weird design. Everything somehow sticks inside of something else with no room inside the printer. Like spaghetti.
Wherelse Epson printers have a plenty of room inside with a better design. No need to waste alot of time to reverse engineer it (figuring every single cable, motor, and what else not out). A plus for Epson here.
Now... what might have impressed me alot?
Take a look at the attached picture. The power on button(design), the display (it is usually soldered on Epson printers) and the "door servant" as I call the part with the blue cables. The "door servant" pushes the stick down when it has electricity.
I never found these like this in Epson printers.
3 -
It is the time for the proper long personal rant.
Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me
if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?
As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.
The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.
If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.
I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.
I might add something later, that is all for now. -
Overengineering. Finding the right point between overdesign and no design at all. That's where fancy languages and unusual patterns being hit by real world problems, and you need to deal with all that utter mess you created being architecture astronaut. Isn't that funny how you realize that another fancy tool is fundamentally incompatible with the task you need to solve, and you realize it after a month of writing workarounds and hacks.
But on the other hand, duct tape slacking becomes a mess even quicker.
Not being able to promote projects. You may code the shit out of side project and still get zero response, absolutely no impact. That's why your side projects often becomes abandoned.
Oversleeping. You thought tomorrow was productive day, but you wake up oversleeped, your head aches, your mind is not clear and you be like "fuck that, I'm staying in bed watching memes all day". But there's job that has to be done, and that bothers you.
Writing tests. Oh, words can't describe how much I hate writing tests, any kind of. I tried testing so many times in high school, at university, even at production, but it seems like my mind is just doesn't accept it. I know that testing is fundamentally important, but my mind collapses every time I try to write a single fucking test, resulting in terrible headache. I don't know why it's like that, but it is, and I better repl the shit out of pure function than write fucking tests. -
Been bughunting the last week or so on this import job that is suddenly running so slowly that it takes more than 24h and is restarting on top of itself.
It used to run in anywhere from 4 to 8 hours, which was bad enough. You see, it ran on timer scheduled by our main site. So our deployment window was determined by when this job finished, and if it didn't finish during work hours, then no deployment that day.
So we got the idea to move it to a separate service to eliminate that deployment window bottleneck. And now, seemingly unrelated, it is just running slow as shit.
There is a lot of bad design in the code, and we know we want to build a completely new solution. But we also absolutely need this import to run every day until a better solution can take over.
We've taken care of some of the most obvious problems that could cause the poor performance, but it's unclear whether it's going to be enough. And with a runtime of about a day and wild variations of the most atomic partial imports, it's extremely tedious to test as well...3 -
This was originally a reply to a rant about the excessive complexity of webdev.
The complexity in webdev is mostly necessary to deal with Javascript and the browser APIs, coupled with the general difficulty of the task at hand, namely to let the user interact with amounts of data far beyond network capacity. The solution isn't to reject progress but to pick your libraries wisely and manage your complexity with tools like type safe languages, unit tests and good architecture.
When webdev was simple, it was normal to have the user redownload the whole page everytime you wanted to change something. It was also normal to have the server query the database everytime a new user requested the same page even though nothing could have changed. It was an inefficient sloppy mess that only passed because we had nothing better and because most webpages were built by amateurs.
Today webpages are built like actual programs, with executables downloaded from a static file server and variable data obtained through an API that's preferably stateless by design and has a clever stateful cache. Client side caches are programmable and invalidations can be delivered through any of three widely supported server-client message protocols. It's not to look smart, it's engineering. Although 5G gets a lot of media coverage, most mobile traffic still flows through slow and expensive connections to devices with tiny batteries, and the only reason our ever increasing traffic doesn't break everything is the insanely sophisticated infrastructure we designed to make things as efficient as humanly possible.11 -
!rant
I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.
The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.
These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.
Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?
What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?
I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.7 -
This year I could join the "Game Graphics" for my elective classes. After seeing that we are split almost exactly in half (graphics design and programmers) our tutor (graphic with 20+ exp in the field, worked on few Call of Duty titles and more) decided that instead of forcing everyone to draw something, we will be making games in groups.
So me, and my friend were grouped with two girls from graphic. I have to say, working close with them was an eyes-opening experience. They don't think like me, they don't see like me and they interpret everything different.
Anyway, as most experienced Unity dev (... Yeaaaah, one game self made and published) I was chosen to get rest of the programmers up to speed. Luckily no one objected and they did what I wanted them to do, so it wasn't bad.
Today was supposedly the last day to present finished prototype. After three weeks staying up till 1 am, working on this project, two other, and nornal job, it was supposed to end. But, no one was really ready. So tutor decided that we will only do this project, an 2D platformer, instead of two, this and 3D game.
While walking around and checking the progress he stayed with us at least two times, watching what we were doing. Since last two weeks were really hectic, we were finishing up animations, adding some polish and such. When he came to us for the second time, he played our prototype. He's a bit older guy, somewhere around his 60, and one could see he wasn't prepared for hard gameplay I presented him with my first level design ever.
He told us his feedback, about how hard it is and not really intuitive, but in the end, he was satisfied. We have made really great progress and brought him something he could play and finish. Which was more than most of other groups had at today. And, as a cherry on the top, he complimented me as a group chief. I don't remember the last time someone complimented my work. The feeling was... Incredible. Touching even.
So, yeah. My hard work wasn't in vain, even though we now have time till the end of the semester. Everyone in my team has given their all and now we can rest for a bit, while others are catching up. Right now I only have to polish some mechanics, rework a bit of level design and add tutorial, while girls from graphic design will be working on better background and sprites.
All in all, it was a pretty good day.6 -
I've been working for 6 months now, and the boss tells me he's not satisfied with my work compared to someone that has 15+ years experience. He clearly states that for him - it's more important lines of code, than planning and defining the architecture which he don't like because that doesn't provide anything...
Of course, I can just jump into the code if that is whats important. I've seen the code produced by the other guy, and its shit.
The guy is a talker, and knows how to talk. I'm more like, hey lets create a simple design prototype or do some UML diagrams to get a better visualization of what we need.
Anyway, its just annoying to be compared to someone with many years of experience, its not that I can achieve it overnight...11 -
I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.
Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:
//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO
# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO
# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO
# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO
# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO
# Do not read the documentation. YOLO
# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO
# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)
# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO
# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO
# You always use production as an environment. YOLO
# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO
# Don’t indent. YOLO
# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO
# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO
# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO
# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO
So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.
*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.
*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.
*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.
*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.
*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.2 -
Oh god where do I start!?
In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.
The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.
That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.
I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.
I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.
I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:
PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.
The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.
Also recently, and in another direction:
PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.
*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.
Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*
I'll think of more when I can. -
Who else hates Teams here? I really think it's one of the worst programs I have to use from time time. It's full of overly complicated features and bad UX design. Slack is soooo much better and more user-friendly.7
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Trust Google. Trust the Process.
The Android Studio Installer doesn't show download progress bars, speeds, ETAs or the size of files being downloaded. I hate this design. Tell me exactly what, why, and where is being downloaded so that I can download it myself with a better HTTP large file client, put it where you want it, and restart the installer. I know my machine and ISP and Google does not. I don't trust Google to make a single right decision, and I only want to relinquish control when I don't have time to do something myself.7 -
!dev
I have this urge to get better at coding and software architecture and design. But fuck me if I'm not lazy about it.
All these crazy good books and lectures and here I am, doing jackshit to improve. Can't even finish my own personal projects. Bah.
I know how I'm supposed to go about it, how to keep engaged in a cycle of personal betterment. I lack self-discipline to do it though... Tried meditation for a time, but haven't really stuck to it. Currently trying to follow stoics (Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and some others), but the mindset is not so easy to adopt, and the practical philosophies even harder.
Oh well. Life is hard. Blah-blah-blah. Thanks for reading. Just wanted to vent, really.8 -
Conversion rates and shipping make it awfully expensive to get official t-shirts here in India, so I decided to experiment with t-shirt printing till the time I can earn enough to donate directly to open source foundations.
I call this design "FUCK YOU, AUTODESK!!"
(Yes it's literally just the logo. Yes I'm not a graphic designer)
Not too bad, but the print could've been better. Time to start tweaking things.
8 -
I was walking in the cineplex after watching a movie today and saw an advertisement for "a digital loyalty card platform for retail outlets. Get loyalty cards on your phone!" being used by a big brand in my country.
The thing is, although not a terribly original idea, I first thought of developing a system/platform like this all the way back in 2012. I coded it, I advertised, I lobbied HARD; I poured my damn soul into this thing. Nobody accepted it. I scrapped it because I thought it was just not a good idea, only to see what is essentially a clone of it being shown off and lauded as a brand new innovative solution.
I won't lie, seeing that ad so prominently and proudly displayed really crushed me. I honestly don't know what makes their rendition better than mine, since mine did pretty much the same thing theirs does and my design chops are pretty much on par with theirs. I was rejected and I don't know why and that stings more than the countless other times my other ideas were shot down because of market mismatch, logistical flaws or just shortsightedness on the part of potential customers.
This isn't an invitation to a pity party, and I can't say there is a moral to this little anecdote, but I feel moved to share this experience with you guys.
Pick from it and learn what you will, I hope this falls under the eyes of the right person out there.5 -
I really resent people who reduce the occupation to tickets. Our world is just tickets, tickets all the way down.
"well the ticket just says this, but that's vague, so what should I do?"
You either ask for clarification, or you get creative with the blank canvas you were handed.
"well that edge case wasn't called out in the ticket's specs"
this is _why_ we do TDD - to design our code to be able to function as expected for ALL cases
"is there a ticket to refactor that?"
what?! no, it's your job to always leave code better than when you found it (within scope/reason of course)
FFS we are not hired to be code monkeys or glorified typists. There should be joy that comes from getting to be more clever than the average bear and to solve problems and improve things with your code and logic.
shit bums me out.7 -
Generally devs who are too arrogant to accept help or constructive criticism. There’s this data visualisation library that missed a specific feature that psychologists use quite frequently, so I added it myself and opened a PR. The maintainer closed it because people should use whatever he’d already implemented. It’s like not giving someone the option to listen to disco because rock music is better. Yeah, cool story bro. Now all my visualisation projects depend on my fork instead. Same with the now abandoned Material Design Library devs. They didn’t have a drop down with free input, so I opened a PR with my solution. Closed as it was out of scope, simply because Google didn’t specifically include that in the Material specs, only an input and a drop down separately which my solution matched. I also opened a PR for an obviously missing feature (being able to validate forms via JS), closed as this behaviour wasn’t in the Material specs either. No wonder MDL died before it was ever finished.4
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can we just get rid of floating points? or at least make it quite clear that they are almost certainly not to be used.
yes, they have some interesting properties that make them good for special tasks like raytracing and very special forms of math. but for most stuff, storing as much smaller increments and dividing at the end (ie. don't store money as 23.45. store as 2,345. the math is the same. implement display logic when showing it.) works for almost all tasks.
floating point math is broken! and most people who really, truely actually need it can explain why, which bits do what, and how to avoid rounding errors or why they are not significant to their task.
or better yet can we design a standard complex number system to handle repeating divisions and then it won't be an issue?
footnote: (I may not be perfectly accurate here. please correct if you know more)
much like 1/3 (0.3333333...) in base 10 repeats forever, that happens with 0.1 in base 2 because of how floats store things.
this, among other reasons, is why 0.1+0.2 returns 0.300000046 -
So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.
You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.
But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.
Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)
So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.
It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.8 -
What happens when you give a database design to your boss as per what he wants done, he sees it is not impressed, scolds you, curses you out and claims you are 'fraud'. Then you tell him you can do better to redeem yourself...you submit the work better than the first time
And then he terminates you due to 'lack of proficiency'.3 -
The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
To be honest I forgot completely about the ducks and was kind of disappointed to see them, don't understand me wrong, its a great addition to the shop (especially to support devrant more when buying them and I will probably do too) and trogus (wow it's pronounced t-rogus) deserves a lot of respect for going through the very hard process of developing it, getting somebody to do a decent quality result etc. but I was hoping for the new site that got hyped up some time ago or some update to the app that fixes design issues on phones that have 2k resolution and no statusbar and more. ("just open a github issue" - I don't have one right now and it didn't get much attention anyway, since I am in the niche of people with those kind of setups, most people it seems have phones that can even barely run the app lol). The login still pops up each time you visit the site (basically just click it away, but it's rather annoying to have it pop up), it's nowhere near to the original app (although the native app is written in some sort of wrapper anyway?) - especially what comes to options, customizing, deactivating things, posting into categories (newest feature), getting notifications etc
There is some community builds that try to recreate a better desktop experience, but sadly fail to do so (sorry to devrantron and others, but what the fuck were you thinking when you rounded only the top right and left corner?) - since they always have something that is just thrown out to "be there" or design fails (which devrant just lacks and looks good across the board), that makes me rather cautious if that program doesn't send my credentials to some african prince. ("just look at the sourcecode", yes I have better things to do, thanks)
I could just create my own build, having to reverse engineer the whole website and app (granted, most of it are just api calls), but I simply lack the time (so I understand why my mentioned problems aren't getting really any attention or can't be implemented that fast, yet still its somewhat bugging)
I have listened to the Q&A and I know you guys are working full time at for example adobe (amazing that you both have time to be putting it towards devrant), so its not as much of a rant, just wanted to get out my disappointment about the event I felt personally. Still nice to have seen you and talk with the community a bit (although the time I feel was picked more towards your US audience rather than EU?).3 -
After previous rant (https://lynkz.me/9xAFVZ9) he told me to be as close as possible to the design from the designer. There was on the left side a BarCode, which made no sense. So I didn’t add it. Now today (saturday) he told me I need to add the barcode because it looks classy. I told him we had a QR code already with same data. His anwser, yeah but it looks better with Barcode added too. Just f*** off! Your classy, shitty barcode will have a great price as it’s weekend. Thanks @linuxxx for the url shortner, it’s awesome!9
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Hi guys! I need your help.
I'm currently facing a big decision.
I've got a job offer a couple of days ago. The new job would involve an 80% raise to my current salary, and I would make another step on the hierarchy ladder.
BUT
The new place is not a software development company. They have a small team working on internal stuff, but they are basically maintaining a 12 years old garbage.
My job would be, to design the new system from the ground up. At the moment, the new system has to do the same things as the old one, just faster and better. Then they'd like to extend it further.
The first part is not challenging, but the things that they planned in the future sound interesting.
The problem is, that my current company just got a new contract and I'm supposed to conduct the deploy (speaking with their managers, prepare their sites for installation, and install). And since it is a small startup, the deploy depends highly on me.
If I take the new job, then I have to start in February which ultimately means that I screw my current company real bad. They'll probably survive, but they might lose this contract and/or lose money.
If I do what makes economic sense, then I take the job. (fuck it's almost 2x as much!!) But I have mixed feelings about it.
I've got 48 hours to decide.
What do you guys think?6 -
This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:
In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.
If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.
For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.
Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.
It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.
I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.
All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.
Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.
The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.
#wk171 -
Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...
This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:
- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.
- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.
- There's no single source of truth.
- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?
- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!
- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?
- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?
Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.
What I would like to see:
A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.
Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.
Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.
There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.
Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.
In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.
What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.
Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.
In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.
Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.
I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.
Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.12 -
2 job offers on table.
One, where I'd to work on multiple technologies, comfortable timing i.e 6 - 7 hours a day. Enough time to do personal projects.
Other, I'd to work on single technology stack, but more complex and large projects. Good for architectural and design pattern knowledge. Better pay, but stressing work hours like 8-10 hours daily. Might be on weekends as well.
Help me out!18 -
So in the project I’m working on we were about to do a push to live, no major functionality just minor adjustments and nice to have stuff. One of the things I did was a reminder, nothing special just sends an email out if something hasn’t been done for 3 days and then sends an email every day following. Push to live and every thing goes fine with no issues. Day 1 there are no issues. Day 2 there are no issues. Day 3 and I’m inundated with people telling me that the emails are getting sent to practically everyone, shit. What have I done? What have I missed?
So I start looking at the live database hoping for a data problem, no such luck. I look at my code looking for something blatantly obvious but nothing. I start replicating the data but I can’t reproduce this bug and it’s annoying the hell out of me. I checked one of the emails that the client sent to us more thoroughly and seen that it was sent at 07:01. This is odd as our webjob runs at 1am so I start looking at environmental factors and started looking at release management, more out of hope than expectation. I check the staging environment and see that the webjob ran at 7:00. Coincidence I thought, the webjob gets packaged on the release pipeline and everything in the database was dummy data anyway but I’d better check anyway. The database was an exact copy of the live database, turns out a “senior developer” wanted to sanity check everything by running live data through the code so he copied the database over. It was fine for the first couple of days but the data was now 3 days out of date triggering my email code and I get hit with the shit storm. I’ve never met such an incompetent developer in my fucking life, functions 700 lines long, classes that are over 20000 lines, repetition every where and the only design patterns he’s used is when he picks up a child’s colouring book. I can live with the fact that he writes code like someone on their first day of University But copying a database because he wants to “visualise” the fucking data is absolutely farcical. No wonder the project is fucked with a “developer” (in the loosest possible use of the word) is at the helm. -
I learned to program with Game Maker, downloading examples and changing variables to see what they did. After that I wanted to make websites so I followed tutorials and just see what happened if I changed variables and functions. Then came High School where we had exercises with Java and just experimented with the possibilities.
Then in Uni I learned about OOP and Functional which opened even more worlds. After a class on design patterns and designing the architecture of a system, programming was never the same.
And even until this day, I haven't stopped learning better ways to code. Oh how I long for those days where everything is new and how I can build a hello world application and be truly excited about it! That is how I learned to program and why I won't stop anytime soon. 😁 -
F*ck Apple. WatchOs 4 is a downgrade! On first apple watch the system runs half the speed. The music app is now shit, because I can only play music downloaded on the 2gb apple watch. Seriously wtf? Maybe I have more music than 2gb. There new design of the app slowed the app down to 15 fps...
The story watch face is complete crap it shows all the time only "Good morning, name".
The worst is I can't go back to the watchOS 3 which was so many times better...
And you still have this bug that pisses me off since watch OS 1 you can hear every sounds coming from your watch with your Bluetooth headphones, but not calls.
You have to hear the call with the apple watch speakers when you don't want to buy airpods.
In other words the function is useless.
And it's one of the most important.
Pls apple why has every watchOS update have to be an downgrade...
And I don't have any chance to get off of this version unlike with iOS. -
Warnings are design errors.
https://dev.to/sebach1/...
I think is better to paste the post here, but it doesn't allow MD :(
Wanna hear your opinions.
Fuck warnings.13 -
As a designer, I don’t really like material design.. but I’m dabbling with vuetify and i must say, it’s dope. And is making my life better3
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So fellow dev asked me design suggestion knowing that I did design way before, I provided him with ok-ish solution and he said to me: 'this is way better response than designer gave me!'. So curious as I am I asked him what did he said? He said : 'Yeah, sure!' on everything he asked if it is ok to add to screen!
That feeling when devs are better designers than designers you have at disposal!3 -
I want to create an interactive portfolio in a terminal design where you kinda have to type commands to get information. There would be a list of all available commands. Would you guys do it like that or would a normal/simple portfolio be better?7
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The shit code I wrote before my cs degree is marginally better than the shit code I write now. The lack of of improvement is related to the shit job I got after my degree. Cs degree did teach me a lot of good oo concepts and design.... That I rarely use due to shit legacy code I maintain.1
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Virgin Powerbeats™ pro:
- can’t even fit into your pocket, you have to buy special iPants™ with bigger pockets, that would be $1499, thank you
- have buttons so finicky and annoying that you’re really better off with a touch area
- silicone tips deteriorate and are prone to stay inside your ears. Uh oh, anyone but certified iOtholaryngologists™ aren’t authorized to remove them or else they would be put to Apple Jail™. The removal would be $499 per ear, thank you
- you have to be a PhD topologist to figure out how to put them back into their case
- uh oh, one bud just randomly stopped working because of a design flaw in our case, that’s User Error™, would you like to pay for a replacement with your Apple Card™?
- a feel of greasy deteriorating clamshell
Chad Jabra Elite
- a feel of a brass zippo, magnets are just perfect
- firm, real buttons. Improve then just one level and you got the feel of IBM Model M
- you press a button and you hear whatever mics are picking, no need to ever pull them out
- most comfortable buds I’ve ever tried
- small case fits into pockets of my tight booty shorts just fine
- waterproof
- sounds better than anything Noble Audio have ever done
Beats suck i guess 🤷
6 -
Hello DevRant,
I need your help
I'm currently studying Game design and development first year in The Netherlands and I love programming but I hate designing. I was thinking about changing the course to something like Ethical Hacking or Computer science. The reason why I want to do this is that they teach us openfl until second year and I feel like I learn nothing until now.
Do you think would be better to change the course or to stay but start programming in something else? And what programming language would you recommend?
P.s. I also want to apply for a part time job/summer school to gain experience but I had no luck at all.
P.s.s. You are the best community for me!
Return 0;3 -
rant == false && help == true
I usually don't like posting non rant stuff here but I need help.
How do you usually design your service communication class?
I am working on a mobile app which contains talking to a REST service, I usually put all network calls in one class. Down side if it becomes a big class it becomes a pain to maintain. Any thoughts?
For a backend service I usually go with Repository design and it is working out well for me. But for mobile Apps I'd like to see if there is a better approach4 -
For me it was not do much a choice.
I started out using basic and simple text display (graphics existed but was quite difficult).
For a long time I was the sole or part of a pair of devs so specializing was not possible and once we grew to such a size I already was quite proficient in all areas from hardware to customer support and education.
But from that time onto today I have gravitated towards a more backend role mainly because I lack a good sense or visual design.
I know it something looks good, but doing it my self results in more boring or plain designs where more thought goes into UX than nice looking design.
That said, if we do web applications I can still keep up since it usually is more ux heavy ;)
But when it comes to adding background images, nice color sets and such I gladly defer that to colleagues with a better design sense. -
I did a communication and multimedia design study because I was convinced I already knew almost anything.
Ooh the beauty of youth.
But it did help me in the long run, communication with clients and being able to present work with some decent looking presentation and mockups gets the managers all horney as teenagers on springbreak.
Pretty sure thats why I beat some competitors on big projects while their technical skill and team where much better.1 -
Anyone in here have experience with UML in the real entreprise world?
As a student I've learned a lot about documentation and software architectural design, I've worked 3 different places and worked with customers that were developers and all of them seemed to not really do architecture and documentation that well. Personally I find having an overview/guideline for bigger project really helpful
how come you don't see better software documentation and UML out there?
Maybe I just haven't found the right place yet2 -
When I started doing frontend development, I was quite shocked with how people managed to cowboy code their way into building fully functional products with a decent paying client base.
I am talking about fully function SaaS with payment gateway and all, but no version control beyond full backup copies, and spaghetti code everywhere you can literally bring the website down trying to change the homepage design.
... and the startups that managed to do better, some of them forgot the .git on production exposing their entire source code *facepalm* -
This lack of real human contact is getting on my nerves. Most of the text messages, discussions, especially in PR or design roads to follow develop into pissing contests. Always proving how much one is right and the others are wrong. -
I get so pissed off with little details, e.g. useless, wrongly handled boolean return values. Cannot understand how they don't see it my way. Or how they can feel superior by offering platitudes like "One should never use singletons". As if following some stupid rules and patterns from a book made you a better programmer instead of looking closely what each problem really needs. Or how they don't measure properly/scientifically or can't interpret the numbers.
My blood pressure already rising just from writing about it. Maybe I need to get some time off. But at the same time I feel like, they are doing it all wrong or not the way it should be done, so it's hard to let go. To obsessed with all that shit...1 -
Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.
There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?1 -
So I figure since I straight up don't care about the Ada community anymore, and my programming focus is languages and language tooling, I'd rant a bit about some stupid things the language did. Necessary disclaimer though, I still really like the language, I just take issue with defense of things that are straight up bad. Just admit at the time it was good, but in hindsight it wasn't. That's okay.
For the many of you unfamiliar, Ada is a high security / mission critical focused language designed in the 80's. So you'd expect it to be pretty damn resilient.
Inheritance is implemented through "tagged records" rather than contained in classes, but dispatching basically works as you'd expect. Only problem is, there's no sealing of these types. So you, always, have to design everything with the assumption that someone can inherit from your type and manipulate it. There's also limited accessibility modifiers and it's not granular, so if you inherit from the type you have access to _everything_ as if they were all protected/friend.
Switch/case statements are only checked that all valid values are handled. Read that carefully. All _valid_ values are handled. You don't need a "default" (what Ada calls "when others" ). Unchecked conversions, view overlays, deserialization, and more can introduce invalid values. The default case is meant to handle this, but Ada just goes "nah you're good bro, you handled everything you said would be passed to me".
Like I alluded to earlier, there's limited accessibility modifiers. It uses sections, which is fine, but not my preference. But it also only has three options and it's bizarre. One is publicly in the specification, just like "public" normally. One is in the "private" part of the specification, but this is actually just "protected/friend". And one is in the implementation, which is the actual" private". Now Ada doesn't use classes, so the accessibility blocks are in the package (namespace). So guess what? Everything in your type has exactly the same visibility! Better hope people don't modify things you wanted to keep hidden.
That brings me to another bad decision. There is no "read-only" protection. Granted this is only a compiler check and can be bypassed, but it still helps prevent a lot of errors. There is const and it works well, better than in most languages I feel. But if you want a field within a record to not be changeable? Yeah too bad.
And if you think properties could fix this? Yeah no. Transparent functions that do validation on superficial fields? Nah.
The community loves to praise the language for being highly resilient and "for serious engineers", but oh my god. These are awful decisions.
Now again there's a lot of reasons why I still like the language, but holy shit does it scare me when I see things like an auto maker switching over to it.
The leading Ada compiler is literally the buggiest compiler I've ever used in my life. The leading Ada IDE is literally the buggiest IDE I've ever used in my life. And they are written in Ada.
Side note: good resilient systems are a byproduct of knowledge, diligence, and discipline, not the tool you used. -
Have you ever gotten a task where you have to modify some existing code, and to get it to work the way it needs to you have to write some ugly ass code?
And I'm talking FUGLY ass code. The kind where every brain cell you have screams to refactor it all so that your code won't be so ugly and you can live with yourself. But you only wrote it that way because some numbnuts who was fired a year ago designed it that way, and left zero commentary or documentation on his reasoning ("sELf-dOcUmeNtiNg cOde, bRuH!").
It doesn't pose any sort of risk with regards to security or resource management or efficiency, or really even faulty logic. It just looks fucking awful, my brain can instantly see better ways to design it and I don't want history to tie my name to it.
But also the system is being gutted and retired within a matter of months, so maintenance won't even be a concern; and you know that you have a lot of other large tasks that need your attention too, and to refactor will ultimately prove to be a time sink.
I mean ultimately, I know what I need to do, but I guess it's a pride thing. Just makes me feel icky. -
When I was in school days I didnt like computers that much. I knew how to use them but thought classes were lame.
It was a couple of years ago, in the last year of my first computers-related career (here there's no computer science like in USA). It was in the initial stages of my graduation project and our teacher took a look at our database design, fixed it all. And explained:
"The better you designed your database, the easier it'll be to code the project" Explained to us the importance of database normalization and all that.
I really understood it all and discovered finally what was the thing I was studying and how to do software.
From that day, in my early 20s, I've been loving software and knew this is my thing.
Same feeling 6 years later.2 -
Not gonna lie; having both != == and !== and === in JavaScript is one of the most stupid bad design moments; in my opinion.
I am not even going to bother trying to come up with a better syntax for that. I will never get over how bad it is. So bad. === is 🤡8 -
Hey DevRant!
Not really a rant but a question:
I just got accepted into a coding bootcamp. Have any of you been involved in one? How was it? What would you do to make it a better experience throughout? Any advice or suggestions?
It's full time, six months long and I start in October and I want to make sure I make the most of the experience and absorb as much as possible.
I'm super happy that the course appears to be less just learning JavaScript and more involved in the Computer Science side of things, even including bits about C/C++, distributed systems, algorithms and data structures, software design/testing, cryptography, database management, and computer architecture. It also, of course, covers tons of resume work, interview practice, and networking.
Thanks!5 -
I want to read a good Software Engineering book. A modern one, which contains new agile approaches, useful diagrams, etc. Not the classical, not so useful, class diagram.
What do you recommend? I'm currently more into web and mobile apps, and I want to be able to describe my backend and frontend with useful diagrams which describe better to users and other developers my desired design. -
So i ranted about how bad the snapchat app was in terms of design and performance a few days ago here and at a couple of other places and the general conscience was that I should use it for a few days and i would like it.
Well, here's what i have to say. IT STILL SUCKS!
I tried to use it every day to keep up with what others are doing and sometimes try to post but i really don't like his bad the app is. It doesn't make me want to use it. Its a battery hog. It fucking drinks through my battery like nobody's business. The v10 update made it a bit better but it still sucks.
I still don't like the UX design but I have come to hate it less. It still sucks though.
I still don't like that there isn't a proper way to discover people. The "discover" tab is just paid advertisement.5 -
So my first rant is about my current job. I got out of college after a year doing basic research on a SBIR/NASA grant. Nothing too interesting but great entry-level experience on sub-sustenance wages based on the cost of living in 1971.. And finally got that great offer to work with an IoT company for a living wage, with a chance to really flex my hard earned skills, and maybe even the ability to afford medical insurance while paying my rent on time!
They said 'network & software engineering', but my only projects are graphic design for sales copy with a guy who thinks FourSquare is a website hosting service.
They said 'full time', but in reality it isn't.
They said $50k a year, but apparently their mouths wrote a check that they don't have bank to cash.
The guy who approves my projects is taking a vacation because of the coronavirus panic and now I won't get paid for a week.
They seem like nice folks, but also a bit irresponsible and it looks like I fell for a bait-and-switch.
Now I'm trying to find a way of spinning off this experience into something that doesn't look like a lame free-lance graphic design gig while looking for better paying work.
if (!ethical) { alert("fml"); }4 -
Here is an update of the website a friend of mine is creating for our school project:
I showed him a website I‘ve done in the past and that he could copy but edit the sidebar so it fits better to the existing website he had created. Now it looks like this:
(I think it got better but he has to change the colors and the proportion of the header, the sidebar and the footer.)
(https://devrant.io/rants/900237/...)
2 -
Went on this 2 day business show...
Next to me a 100 inch tv... 4k quite awesome jittery video at points ? Codec or cable is wrong...
What was on the right of my stand ... To the cake.
"How to make money online"
He proceeded to state things like I now have 20mill my dream car etc ...
*Me trying not to laugh\be disgusted*
His power point ... Well a 10 year old can do better looks built in 1995
People were buying into it ! How the fuck does someone who has apparently 20mill give such a shit design to people and they listen...
I seriously wanted to go on and say... Don't listen to this fraud this, piece of shit snake oil salesmen.
But I didn't... And.. I regret it. On the bright side ... My stand had the shortest setup in the whole place bet by far the best websites! -
When you invest days to come up with a better design of a system, and the moment you discuss with senior devs, and they present a even better design which they have already considered in their roadmap for a while..
Waiting for the day, my design is the better one and being accepted..1 -
How do you balance what your boss wants, and what the client wants?! 😣
We had design and requirement discussions with clients and they said they want method A.
After doing internal design review and writing up documents, client agreed and sign off on it.
However, during last moments of development, I encountered a minor issue in the design and brought the team together to discuss about it.
Boss went on about how his idea, method B would have been better and is what the client wants, etc. Mind you, method B is quite different from method A that clients want.
I explained to boss that his method is different from what the client wants and also what have been documented and signed off.
He told me he doesn't need comments of such from me and they can always tell the client that method B is better and should be the way.
I feel so fucked because we are currently rushing with only 2 days left in our deadline and there will not be a bonus if we are late.1 -
Was wondering what kind of workflow you use.
My team is currently a big unorganized chaos...
Our manager wants us to take the form of:
Feature idea -> Design -> Build -> Test -> Train (explain to users how to use it) -> Deploy
The `Train` step is something rather odd to me, as that would mean teaching every single employee how to use the product we're making.
Wouldn't it just be better to skip the `train` section (and maybe use some kind of wiki?) and try to make everything as clearly labeled and obvious as possible?6 -
If you do not push something (language, education, people, cars, design, medicine ...etc etc) how the hell do you expect to mature, surpass expectations and become better. Java didn't start off as good or as bad as it is today. It was through testing, abuse, use and pushing it harder do more and more amazing things that it wasn't built for. PHP has changed alot since I started using and it's through people efforts that it gets better. Before the javascript wave came it was a nuisance to use and sucked as most browsers had it switched off by default but it's become more secure, fluent and able to do more amazing things and people are loving it right now.
I really wish people would stop with half arsed and uneducated comments.1 -
IOS keyboard is utter garbage. IOS as a whole is utter garbage, but the keyboard is the cream of the crop of garbage.
Wasting a user's time and destroying/changing the user's input against their wishes is malicious design of the highest order and this dumpster fire excels in it.
Type something completely valid and autocomplete changes it to something that doesn't makes sense. It not only gives you a terrible suggestion half the time, it will also change previous parts of the sentence that it somehow allowed you to keep. If you reject its suggestion, it deletes your current word and previous word(s), instead of restoring it to what it was before it made the terrible suggestion, like every other keyboard does.
Need to go back and adjust your sentence? If you tap it will hijack the cursor and highlight the nearest word it doesn't like instead of moving the cursor where you touch. If you accidentally hit a character on the cramped and unusable keyboard, congrats, you get to type the word again.
I know about hold space to drag the cursor.
I don't want Apple to decide for me that I actually wanted to go to the closest word it doesn't like, or the current word, or the next word based on a dice roll. I want the cursor to go where I tap. Like literally every other input device functions.
Want readily accessible numbers and punctuation? lol no
I know there's gboard, but compared to Android it's also almost unusable. This leads me to believe the keyboard is little more than a skin over the IOS keyboard engine, like Safari, another IOS dumpster fire. But, it is slightly better than the stock keyboard, which isn't saying much.
I yearn, minute by minute, for the time I can ditch this dumpster fire for a real phone.11 -
These days I've been noticing how important is to know how to create a good diagram to convey an idea. Also, working in a big company I noticed that we use UML diagrams for a lot of things, which is very useful to understand the architecture of the system or the design of the code. Does anyone here know some book or article that can help me to learn how to better convey ideas using diagrams, how to make one, and what diagram to use? I am not thinking about something very specific to UML, because I see that sometimes we just do a diagram that makes sense without following any standard.4
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Story of my first successful project
Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.
Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"
I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).
I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".
Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.
Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)
Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."
End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team. -
In addition to the programming language or theoretical concepts. It is also essential to develop good problem solving skills.
Concepts like design patterns and refactoring would be better taught using hands on exercises based on a long running example, such as having the students create a project in an introductory course on a programming language and then take that codebase as a starting point for the assignments on design patterns and refactoring.
It would be unrealistic to assume that developers would be working only on a single programming language in their entire career. So, a few pointers on how to go about learning new languages based on similarities with programming language(s) they already know would also be there. -
I honestly thought spending a full vacation away (fifteen days) from a certain platform would make it feel better to use. As If I was overreacting due to fatigue. Maybe that platform is not slow :you are tired.
Back to work, code and design in a satisfactory time, all is well. Except until building. That. Took. Five. Minutes. THIRTY.
Yeah, Xamarin ios still is a raging bullshit. -
You might think that I'd know better and stop caring about the design while prototyping, but I still can't help it work 4 times as long on the layout than the actual logic3
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Current design philosophy is that the user should be presented with fewer options, fewer ways to do things. Users shouldn't be empowered to created what they want, but should be "guided" into building what we (software designers) think they should have. That is almost verbatim from our company's product and C level officers and is echoed without deviation by product owners and strategists in our company. Holy crap what a bunch of presumptuous, arrogant, idiots. That holier than thou attitude promotes disdain for the customer: "the customer doesn't know better, so let's prevent them from doing it any way but X." The focus is entirely on what's easier for us, not what helps the user solve their problems. That's not a service oriented anymore, that just a bunch of pretentious dickheads that are on the road to losing customers.4
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!rant
Continuation from: https://devrant.com/rants/979267/...
My vision is to implement something that is inspired by Flow Based Programming.
The motivation for this is two fold
* Functional design - many advantages to this, pure functions mean consistent outputs for each input, testable, composable, reasonable. The functional reactive nature means events are handles as functions over time, thus eliminating statefulness
* Visual/Diagrammable - programs can be represented as diagrams, with components, connections and ports, there is a 1 to 1 relationship between the program structure and visual representation. This means high level analysis and design can happen throughout project development.
Just to be clear there are enough frameworks out there so I have no intentions of making a new one, this will make use of the least number of libraries I can get away with.
In my original post I used Highland.js as I've been following the project a while. But unfortunately documentation is lacking and it is a little bare bones; I need something that is a little more featureful to eliminate boilerplate code.
RxJS seems to be the answer, it is much better documentated and provides WAY more functionality. And I have seen many reports of it being significantly easier to use.
Code speaks much louder so stay tuned as I plan to produce a proof of concept (obligatory) todo app. Or if you're sick of those feel free to make a request.3 -
ChatGPT is so much better than Google:
instead of wasting my time by linking to unhelpful / outdated / unrelated StackOverflow resources, it tells me to do the work by myself right away:
> To ensure consistent pseudo-element width across different browsers, including Safari, you can follow these steps: [...]
> (some basic HTML/CSS 101 seemingly quoted from a 2015 textbook)
>
> It's important to note that browser behavior might vary due to different rendering engines or versions. While following best practices helps achieve consistent results, you might still encounter small discrepancies. Cross-browser testing is always recommended to ensure your design looks consistent across different browsers, including Safari.
>
> For any specific issues you encounter in Safari, consider checking for known bugs or quirks that might affect pseudo-elements and their sizing. Online resources, developer forums, and documentation can provide valuable insights into Safari-specific behavior and workarounds.
3 -
<assumption>If there are no fundamental laws constraining the existence of simulated consciousness</assumption>, I would throw in my lot in working towards developing an AGI.
Since there is infinite time to learn any skill and <assumption>it is possible to learn or invent whatever software or mathematical framework is required for such a goal</assumption>, I would get down to that, learning and creating various new forms of mathematical frameworks and required software tools.
<assumption>Engineers usually work best without another fellow human on the project</assumption>, so I will set up automation for tasks that do benefit from multiple minds on a project, in the form of low-level artificial intelligence that I have to work on as a prerequisite for the main goal.
Once the critical mass is hit where the code can keep self-improving and produce more iterations of itself that are better, I sit back and start with my long, long to-watch/to-read list and try to finish as much as I can before the AGI I created would <assumption>repurpose all of our mortal flesh for more efficient use.</assumption>
The only remnant of the existence of humanity will be the influence on the initial design of the code based sentience that exists now.
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Just kidding, <not-an-assumption>I'd probably procrastinate right until the heat death of the universe</not-an-assumption>1 -
I'd probably say the activity that's made me a better dev is going to school for graphic design. Though it would help more if I was a front end developer, it helps me think more about the end user seeing as that's what my schooling focused on. Outside of schooling, probably painting and drawing just due to thinking creatively in my free time I think helps me approach dev problems in different ways than some of my non visual co workers.
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Dev goals for 2022? Best and worst DX in the past?
Wish to prioritize customers with useful business goals who are open to sustainable web dev, usability and accessibility.
Want to use even more CSS and find a way to use new features like parent selectors without sacrificing compatibility.
Continue learning and using Symfony, but also continue with my full-stack side project using JS or even better TypeScript for the backend also for the backend.
Best developer experience: getting new customers for my own business after leaving a company last winter.
Worst developer experiences:
Corporate customers with large budgets and design agencies seem to fancy all the antipatterns I thought bad and obsolete, like carousel content, animations everywhere, and autoplay videos on the home page. Poorly written, poorly thought, and sometimes contradictory, requirements. Customers and agencies changing their mind halfway through a project.
"Agile" daily meetings, not giving devops necessary repository permissions, and making Webpack mandatory for no real reason.2 -
I'm on vacation.
A friend asked me if I could work on a freelance web project. I was getting bored of summer vacations so I said yes.
It was a website for online lottery and it was already developed by some freelancers.
Owner wanted more freelancers to revamp design and administration panel.
I looked at the site and knew that I had seen the worst design and code of my life.
Frontend was made of two colors only, black and yellow. Out of both, black was more prominent. Moreover it had nothing related to Js as if it was developed as a challenge to be accomplished without java script.
Admin panel and backend was much worse than that. No security practices and deprecated essential libraries.
The nightmare is about to end as I have inducted a much better design from themeforest for frontend.
Backend is in my homebrew php framework.
(Good luck future freelancers 😆)
I'm positive that next edits will be features additions only and no one will blame my code.6 -
This has been bothering me for a while. I have an old freelance client of mine I’ve created an web site for (his company) it was small one so I took the complete payment before deployment and I needed no contract. I deployed the complete version of the site on my server, bought the domain for his company under my name and it has been running for a year now.
Lately he had asked me to give admin privileges to his son (cs student 1y) to upload some photos of their new building. I noticed he ruined several functions on the site in doing so, but I was never paid to support that just the hosting for a year.
When I was making the design I made a simple but pretty logo as a placeholder for the site which went in production since they never gave me company logo. All good, no contract small cash all delivered, everyone happy.
Up until few days when I saw my f**king logo cut out from the site as 250px jpeg and made as a huge banner on the company building..
From my pov I would’ve never given permission to use that since its not something i’m proud of and would suggest to make a better one for a fee. I see this as stolen/unauthorized use of intellectual property. But the laws are super shitty in our country so at this point I am stuck at taking their site, domain a hostage until they pay for the logo they used or take it down or taking legal actions.. we never signed anything about that logo.4 -
There is a side project that they've been working on. The CEO laid out the details to the Product Owner and Tech Lead. Now what he wants to happen is beyond the scope of the business core itself and it would take months to do the changes just to make the side project work. Now both of them ask the timeline for this, CEO said 1 week. 1 fucking week (he's a dev in his glory days which is why the short timeline). He know proceeds to suggest to us how we should do it (like he normally does). But Tech Lead knows better. So with the help of one of the junior devs, they proceed with the Tech Lead's plan. Now come for updates, they presented that its working and such. The CEO became furious as to why they decided to design it that way (of course you dingus, you gave them 1 week and expect quality). Now what triggered me was 2 things, first is his comment on the way they designed it. Its "flawed design". WTF ARE YOU EXPECTING? YOU ARE A FORMER DEV. YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER. Second, is the junior dev is asking me about the project. WHY IS HE ASKING ME. I always tell him that ask Tech Lead. Some of his questions should have been answered by Tech Lead. He even questions the design itself(why they designed it the way they did). I DON'T EVEN KNOW WTF Y'ALL BEEN TALKING ABOUT THIS PROJECT AND YOU'RE ASKING ME. Flawed design, more like flawed communication.1
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I graduated college with double degrees in literature and marketing management. Web and software development and design was a hobby that became my way of life and eventual career path. I guess it's more of a challenge than a hurdle, not having a formal IT education as a foundation, but I'm happy to have learned a lot from my colleagues over the years to better myself as a dev in practice, if not in academics.4
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!rant. Story:
There are a lot of things I would like to do, but the lack of enough money makes it hard.
My goals are to become more active on YouTube, find clients and hold them, try to learn how to sell products convincingly, become better at web design, understand university-level mathematics, leave Germany (one particular reason for this is the need of the redundant imprint), help people around the world, become more fit bodywise (by doing e.g. swimming, jogging and going to the gym), eat healthy and drink a lot of water, work on my emotional intelligence, learn peoples' behaviours and why they do what they do, write my own book, finally start practicing yoga and muay thai, live on my own, make a world tour for a year, learn the skill of powered paragliding, getting the license for powered paragliding, glide with a powered paraglider the whole day, build a house in the woods, create my own satellite and launch it, develop new things (like building some sort of vehicle that can fly in a special way), learn about biology, chemistry, physics (I hate it, but I believe in the power of what is going to happen once you learn it), become more aware of what is happening, live on the streets with no money to learn the ability to survive in more extreme situations, learn how to use guns, bombs, snipers and knifes properly (don't assume that I am a terrorist now haha, I am just interested in that type of stuff. That's all to it) ...
But all of that, obviously, not in 2020. More like within 10 years.1 -
A peer told me today that if I wanted to get better at my job as architect, I needed to focus on building things so they could be handed off to another team when they got too big for my team to support.
He seemed to take exception to my assertion that we DESIGN things on PURPOSE to not need to do that.
I guess I need more training. -
One thing I realized about my workplace: when you're given a new template to be used for an existing website project, do NOT use the included CSS files. Seems like it would be better to just manually change the looks of the website to make it similar to that template, lest you want some alignment stuff to break.
Plus, it seems that I don't even need to meet all the design requirements, because whenever I try to do that, clients tend to forget the design they originally gave and request for all these changes.
One more month... One more month and I'm off to bootcamp to properly learn.1 -
All designers and developers are secretly in love with cookie banners and other kinds of popups, as long as they distract users, obscure content and contain a lot of text that is hard to understand.
We must love to deceive our users and make them click a primary call to action button to make sure that they are fine with bypassing anything that privacy laws have been made for in the first place.
Or where are the best practice examples, code snippets and plugins do find a better way by default? Any commercial website will sooner or later require some kind of cookie banner and that's the whole point of contemporary web design.3 -
I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!
5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.
4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.
3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.
2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.
1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)
This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.
Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.
Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.
Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.
Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.
Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay -
I have no specific story to tell (for now. Will post ke if i remember one) but i have had tons of CS teachers that are shit. From ones who don't know shit to ones who are so bad as a human being i am sure thrte are hundreds of people out there to kill them. I have had multiple teachers where all they did was read out a book and we'd have o site everything they read. Whole fucking semester. And not just one person or once. M-U-L-T-I-P-L-E TIMES AND TEACHERS. then I ve had ones who would rejection my code even if it's better, is right, can andle more edge cases, most likely magnitfrs of times faster and isn an eye sore with just effig if-else on op of if-else nested within if-else with many for loops. Then there are those who want you to do just what they want and expect you to not have a life of your own. Those who blatantly abuse their powers. Those who couldn't care less. Those who are not that bad a teacher but their attitude and style just makes you want to leave. There's one currently who wants a group of 4 people in second year to develop a full blown industry level application in mere 3 weeks. AND WE ARE HAVING OUR THEORY PAPRRS INBETWEEN FOR 2 EFFING WEEKS. So that's just like a month. Fortunately I have a group that's good enough that I can have them do the testing and filling up the documentation (did I mention that he needs full documentatiin for software plus a report on how our development process) and have them work on presentation (yup. We need to present this thing) all for just 50 marks. 1 uni credit. Our system still gives 80% weightage to pure theory. Plus the practical part is somewhat theory too.
Our HOD wants us *insists*forces** to stay back at college and work on projects (which is nice but what he ments is use the shitty outdated books from early 2000s to study something). Now I'd be happy to stay back if college provided decent internet (I am not asking for gigabit speeds. Even 1-2Mbps would work) and place to sit. But nope, our college non-teaching staff is eager to send us out of their department and by extention college building. There is literally nowhere you can sit. Plus yup, there is no internet and nowhere for you to plug your laptop in. That's a moot point anyway because they don't want you to use your laptop in college library or anywhere anyways. Plus you don't get much of mobile data too because of the building design. Those work only near windows. Why would I be at college if I can get a 50+Mbps down, area to sit, snacks, port to charge all at home. And you'd say we should talk with him about this – well it's not his issue is all he has to say.
Well, such is life in Indian colleges. And my college/uni is one of the better ones.1 -
What's better for finding candidates for a development role: having the candidate solve a complex whiteboard problem or have the candidate refactor some code (maybe a couple of small modules) while explaining as he/she goes through each step?
I personally feel both are good, but I think refactoring is a very much needed skill when you're dealing with the complexity of millions and millions lines of code, so being able to change your inital design to make it more readable and flexible later on is crucial. And refactoring usually goes hand and hand with having tests in place.
An interesting exercise would be to give the candidate a test suite with the corresponding code that's tested in a working state and let the candidate decide how much refactoring needs to be done. In the process the candidate would need to break and fix tests of course while changing things... it'll give a good measure of their ability to take code and change it to a "better" state of design and flexiblity.
On the other hand I do think there is a place for cliche white boarding problems because it really shows one willingness to tackle complex problems which do arise in most development jobs. Asking the questions and being persistent goes along way and can really help when you're collaborating with other developers to solve an issue at hand.
Overall I think there should be a white board problem, but I don't think that should be the deciding factor. Rather couple it with other very practical skills you should have as a developer already; among those being refactoring.1 -
The one in which I am rn is the reason why so many people dislike php, jquery and Java on the server.
Then previous to this one, classic ASP for the web interface and our desktop components were delphi (OLD ass delphi)
Mind you, these are all tech stacks that I do like (php, java and O Pascal in particular) but really dislike in:
php: we have just your standard procedural spaghetti php on some old ass shit.
Classic ASP: Same as with php, no proper structure, made more apparent by the intense limitations of VBScript, I did enjoy the language tho, had it evolved better It would have been more tolerable, but the hoops i had to take to build a propee API in it....boooooy that shit was an eye opener.
Delphi: Not bad in itself, but the original dev had a shit notion about how architecture should work.....or what architecture is for that matter.
The Java one: this shit was coded when Spring was already an alternative to just fucking around with JSP, or any other framework for that fucking matter. Dude tried....TRIED to implement design patterns in it and it failed on every single fucking component. Worst of all, it was coded in such a shit way that during certain...err...conditions, the bottleneck proved too massive of an ubdertaking and the app chokes and needs to be restarted ... constantly
their use cases for jquery are not bad, but loading all of jquery for the shit they mostly do could have been easily done with just standard vanilla JS.
I got more, but thede are just from the top of my head
I love php, mind you, but shit like this makes me see why some people GREATLY dislikes it.
I alsp have some old web forms in c# and vb net that I loathe, funny enough the code for thise in vb.net is more elegant, almost as if it were from a different developer.3 -
tldr; I failed a web class once, then practically taught people actionscript. Now i love JavaScript/Node.js because flash is icky.
-full story more or less-
I failed my first web design class in college due to not having enough time to actually study(I worked 2 jobs and took 6 classes like a moron). Anyway took a flash class prior to retaking my web class, I picked up on action script really quickly. As in I ended up helping other students better than the instructor was(she hadn't touched flash in like 5 years and was just an adjunct instructor). I got hooked with action script so I started teaching myself JavaScript, knocked the web class out like nothing after that and loved it. -
I’m working on a new app I’m pretty excited about.
I’m taking a slightly novel (maybe 🥲) approach to an offline password manager. I’m not saying that online password managers are unreliable, I’m just saying the idea of giving a corporation all of my passwords gives me goosebumps.
Originally, I was going to make a simple “file encrypted via password” sort of thing just to get the job done. But I’ve decided to put some elbow grease into it, actually.
The elephant in the room is what happens if you forget your password? If you use the password as the encryption key, you’re boned. Nothing you can do except set up a brute-forcer and hope your CPU is stronger than your password was.
Not to mention, if you want to change your password, the entire data file will need to be re-encrypted. Not a bad thing in reality, but definitely kinda annoying.
So actually, I came up with a design that allows you to use security questions in addition to a password.
But as I was trying to come up with “good” security questions, I realized there is virtually no such thing. 99% of security question answers are one or two words long and come from data sets that have relatively small pools of answers. The name of your first crush? That’s easy, just try every common name in your country. Same thing with pet names. Ice cream flavors. Favorite fruits. Childhood cartoons. These all have data sets in the thousands at most. An old XP machine could run through all the permutations over lunch.
So instead I’ve come up with these ideas. In order from least good to most good:
1) [thinking to remove this] You can remove the question from the security question. It’s your responsibility to remember it and it displays only as “Question #1”. Maybe you can write it down or something.
2) there are 5 questions and you need to get 4 of them right. This does increase the possible permutations, but still does little against questions with simple answers. Plus, it could almost be easier to remember your password at this point.
All this made me think “why try to fix a broken system when you can improve a working system”
So instead,
3) I’ve branded my passwords as “passphrases” instead. This is because instead of a single, short, complex word, my program encourages entire sentences. Since the ability to brute force a password decreases exponentially as length increases, and it is easier to remember a phrase rather than a complicated amalgamation or letters number and symbols, a passphrase should be preferred. Sprinkling in the occasional symbol to prevent dictionary attacks will make them totally uncrackable.
In addition? You can have an unlimited number of passphrases. Forgot one? No biggie. Use your backup passphrases, then remind yourself what your original passphrase was after you log in.
All this accomplished on a system that runs entirely locally is, in my opinion, interesting. Probably it has been done before, and almost certainly it has been done better than what I will be able to make, but I’m happy I was able to think up a design I am proud of.8 -
Today was a little better, we discussed a bit about design with client and agreed to add two new screens inside application. Need to organize some backend logic for this.
Nothing difficult but there might be some problems as we progress trough this data during first implementation.
Don’t have a graphic designer in a team anymore so lots of freedom and mistakes. -
HFS, MacBooks standard file system is the answer to that every question asking "what if you don't design well/ how bad can it get."
How can a bloody file system not be case sensitive.
I know you want to be different from *nix
But there would have been better ways1 -
Bullshittery continues. This time around, absolutely innocent, clamav is root cause. For once not incompetent idiot, but piece of software. IDK if that makes me happy or upset.
So our email server that I configured and took care of died. RIP. Damn, better put it back together ASAP. So Im under pressure, while still pissed at everything that I ranted before (actually my last 2 rants were throttled, and in total all of that happened past 60 minutes but devrant rate limiting) I start auditing logs. You imagine, we kindda need it NOW, and it's second time last month clamav is pulling stunts and MTA refuses (properly) to work without antivirus. So pressurized, I look at logs, what the fuck went wrong.
clamav deamonize() failed - cannot allocate memory
Hmm. Intresting, but sounds like bullshit. I know server is quite micro becouse they wanted to save on costs as much as possible, but it has well over half a gig free ram just before it crashes (like 800MB) with that message. Is it allocating almost gig in one call or what? Looked carefully at trusty htop while it was starting, and indeed, suddenly it just dies with quite a bit of ram free, almost as much as it weights already. And I remember booting it up when I was configuring it, and it had fair bit of headroom.
Google, help me friend... Okay, great, so apparently at some point clamav loads virus DB into ram (dafuq?), and than forks, which causes spike of 2x the ram usage, and than immidietely frees it up.
Great, that sounds like great design decision... At least I know, I can just slap on SWAP file, restart it and call it a day.
It worked, swap file is almost empty (used 15megs, 900 megs free ram, whatever).
That leaves me wandering, who figured out to load DB to ram? That means pretty much that clamav will eat a little bit more ram each vir db update, and that milisecond "double ram" spike will confuse innocent people who just wanted to run clamav and it worked last *long period of time* and now crashes without warning without any changes to configuration.
Maybe there is logical explanation, I want to know it.8 -
Do u think game design is really a field one can study?
No offence, it just seems to me like a pseudo science.
I know there are some kinds of study programmes and stuff.
I just think it is way better for people to be experienced in coding, do graphics as a hobby and study psychology (or something related) instead.18 -
During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.
Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.
Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.
The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)
It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.
Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.
You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:
1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries
2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc
From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.
This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.
So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.
Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P
Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.
And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.3 -
Wow, yesterday was fun!
I had a rather buggy piece of code, it was bad when I first wrote it, and then I fixed it up, and it was still bad. Now I rewrote almost all of it, and it's much better.
Bad? How? Well, it was in Go, and it's basically an agent meant to execute tasks one at a time, and report the results back to home (live). Now while it worked, it was really flimsy, race conditions, way to much blocking, bad logic, and some very bad bugs.
So I had to rewrite it. Time for a quick primer on the design of this: you have a queue, a task gets add to the queue, the task manager runs the task. In the mean time, the agent is polling the host with the latest output from the task, and also receives new tasks to run (if there are any).
Seems like something that's for a messaging queue, you ask? Well, that would be true if each task was able to run on any random agent, but each task is only meant to run the agent it's tasked to (the tasks are of administrative nature al la apt-get), so having a whole separate service is a tad overkill.
So rewriting required rethinking how the tasks are executed by the task manager. I spent a day on this, it was fun, I ended up copying go contexts (very simple model, very useful). Why copy and not reuse? Because this is meant to be low memory code, so any extra parts are problematic, and I didn't really see a use for having a whole context, I just needed a way to announce that a task is done.
Anyways, if you're interested to see how the implementation worked out: https://github.com/chabad360/covey/...1 -
I feel compelled to figure out how to use software in a gaming setting to teach skills like CS and Math. But do it in a way that is fun and not feeling like a "math game".
I want to spend more time learning about algorithms, architectures, design approaches, etc. Writing such a game would force me to understand what I present in a very intimate way.
I can see a way to create algos in game using very visual ways. Then allowing someone to make superstructures combining those algos to solve tasks.
I was inspired by how some algos require data to be sorted a certain way before starting. As the algo as a side effect resorts the data to know when it has completed. I realized if an algo is generic enough it can be combined just like functions or objects.
I also want to learn math better, especially in conjunction with code. So making a platform for learning these would be a lot of fun. I would definitely want both visual and textual interfaces to the code. I have to imagine a real programmer being frustrated with a visual interface unless it was really compelling.
I find it interesting that a lot of algos are represented visually when trying to show how it works. I realize some probably cannot be visualized so easy though.
I also want to use software like this to teach someone to think more deliberately and help people be more disciplined in their thinking. I know I could use this.
I have a secret goal of being able to use such software to help someone become a math/programming wizard. I don't know if this is achievable, but having exercises that help solidify root concepts in a fun way would be really useful IMO. -
What do you think of the Database design of Drupal/WordPress? They use 2 tables for 85% of the data!! Product, pages, whatever are all stored in the same 2 tables. Does that work out better than having each content type in separate tables?
I'm thinking of making an ERP. Would that table structure work there?2 -
Reading some system design study materials.
Unless it's literally a startup from scratch. I feel like that proper response to the "design youtube/twitter" question should be: I really hope your product team comes up with better requirement than just design a product, get to it -
I need some advice to avoid stressing myself out. I'm in a situation where I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place at work, and it feels like there's no one to turn to. This is a long one, because context is needed.
I've been working on a fairly big CMS based website for a few years that's turned into multiple solutions that I'm more or less responsible for. During that time I've been optimizing the code base with proper design patterns, setting up continuous delivery, updating packaging etc. because I care that the next developer can quickly grasp what's going on, should they take over the project in the future. During that time I've been accused of over-engineering, which to an extent is true. It's something I've gotten a lot better at over the years, but I'm only human and error prone, so sometimes that's just how it is.
Anyways, after a few years of working on the project I get a new colleague that's going to help me on my CMS projects. It doesn't take long for me to realize that their code style is a mess. Inconsistent line breaks and naming conventions, really god awful anti-pattern code. There's no attempt to mimic the code style I've been using throughout the project, it's just complete chaos. The code "works", although it's not something I'd call production code. But they're new and learning, so I just sort of deal with it and remain patient, pointing out where they could optimize their code, teaching them basic object oriented design patterns like... just using freaking objects once in a while.
Fast forward a few years until now. They've learned nothing. Every time I read their code it's the same mess it's always been.
Concrete example: a part of the project uses Vue to render some common components in the frontend. Looking through the code, there is currently *no* attempt to include any air between functions, or any part of the code for that matter. Everything gets transpiled and minified so there's absolutely NO REASON to "compress" the code like this. Furthermore, they have often directly manipulated the DOM from the JavaScript code rather than rendering the component based on the model state. Completely rendering the use of Vue pointless.
And this is just the frontend part of the code. The backend is often orders of magnitude worse. They will - COMPLETELY RANDOMLY - sometimes leave in 5-10 lines of whitespace for no discernable reason. It frustrates me to no end. I keep asking them to verify their staged changes before every commit, but nothing changes. They also blatantly copy/paste bits of my code to other components without thinking about what they do. So I'll have this random bit of backend code that injects 3-5 dependencies there's simply no reason for and aren't being used. When I ask why they put them there I simply get a “I don't know, I just did it like you did it”.
I simply cannot trust this person to write production code, and the more I let them take over things, the more the technical debt we accumulate. I have talked to my boss about this, and things have improved, but nowhere near where I need it to be.
On the other side of this are my project manager and my boss. They, of course, both want me to implement solutions with low estimates, and as fast and simply as possible. Which would be fine if I wasn't the only person fighting against this technical debt on my team. Add in the fact that specs are oftentimes VERY implicit, so I'm stuck guessing what we actually need and having to constantly ask if this or that feature should exist.
And then, out of nowhere, I get assigned a another project after some colleague quits, during a time I’m already overbooked. The project is very complex and I'm expected to give estimates on tasks that would take me several hours just to research.
I'm super stressed and have no one I can turn to for help, hence this post. I haven't put the people in this post in the best light, but they're honestly good people that I genuinely like. I just want to write good code, but it's like I have to fight for my right to do it.1 -
Compromise.
I think that sums up development pretty much.
Take for example coding patterns: Most of them *could* be applied on a global scale (all products)… But that doesn't mean you *should* apply them. :-)
Find a matching **compromise** that makes specific sense for the product you develop.
Small example: SOLID / DRY are good practices. But breaking these principles by for example introducing redundant code could be a very wise design decision - an example would be if you know full ahead that the redundancy is needed for further changes ahead. Going full DRY only to add the redundancy later is time spent better elsewhere.
The principle of compromise applies to other things, too.
Take for example architecture design.
Instead of trying to enforce your whole vision of a product, focus on key areas that you really think must be done.
Don't waste your breath on small stuff - cause then you probably lack the strength for focusing on the important things.
Compromise - choose what is *truly* important and make sure that gets integrated vs trying to "get your will done".
Small example: It doesn't really matter if a function is called myDingDong or myDingDongWithBells - one is longer, other shorter. Refactoring tools make renaming a function an easy task. What matters is what this function does and that it does this efficiently and precise. Instead of discussing the *name* of the function, focus on what the function *does*.
If you've read so far and think this example is dumb: Nope... I've seen PR reports where people struggled for hours with lil shit while the elephant in the room like an N+1 problem / database query or other fundamental things completely drowned in the small shit discussion noise.
We had code design, we had architecture... Same goes for people, debugging, and everything else.
Just because you don't like what weird person A does, doesn't mean it's shit.
Compromise. You don't have to like them. Just tolerate them. Listen. Then try to process their feedback unbiased. Simple as that. Don't make discussions personal - and don't isolate yourself by just working with specific persons. Cause living in such a bubble means you miss out a lot of knowledge and insight… or in short: You suck because of your own choices. :-)
Debugging... Again compromise: instead of wasting hours on debugging a problem, ASK for help. A simple: Has anyone done debugging this before or has some input for how to debug this problem efficiently?... Can sometimes work wonders. Don't start debugging without looking into alternative solutions like telemetry, metrics, known problems etc.
It could be a viable, better long term solution to add metrics to a product than to debug for hours ... Compromise. Find a fitting approach to analyze a problem instead of just starting a brute force approach.
....
Et cetera et cetera. -
Group project at uni, we're learning how to do scrum sprints. So here's a small story about all the ways it can go wrong.
We assign scrum master and product owner roles, what do those do? "We want to do design tho" they say two weeks later.
I end up doing the organization part and structuring the backlog.
"Alright, you guys will be the frontend team, your tasks are X and Y"
No response
One day before the review I ask again
"So, what's the status" (well knowing that they didn't do shit so far)
They start scrambling around, and manage to do like 30% of their tasks at best, I end up doing most of the work for them.
Next week, new sprint, our tutors somehow don't notice that literally 95% of the code has been written by me so far.
"Alright team, hopefully you will do better this time, so and so will be your subteam leader since he knows this stuff"
No response
Some guys start working on independent things without collaborating with each other, sometimes replicating stuff I already did (but obviously worse).
So that's the situation so far, I really would rather kill myself than keep working with these guys, jeeesus1 -
doing documentation in word and having meetings about it, code reviews where people say great code quality with all good practices but... we would like to do it differently, reasons? less lines of code but real reason is not understanding design patterns, also 6 levels of hierarchy and wasted effort to prove that approach is good and considered as good practice just to be changed by someone who doesn't write code anymore. Decisions that other approach is better because they did it that way 10 years ago on last project where they were developers on totally different tech stack. dear friends, welcome to corporation!1
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So my non-tech manager has started doing all the estimates for us developers on features upon high management request to save time, because of course rushing all the estimates for the work to be done in the next 6 months is the best process in software engineering.
All the estimates are based on previous work. Sometimes it will be accurate, but most of the time it is absolutely not.
So I get a task estimated to 3 weeks but I planned for 5. Just fit it in 3 weeks.
I planned for 2 weeks but the original estimate is 5. Just fit it in 5.
What kind of crap is that lol? What is the point of us estimating work if management knows apparently better than us how to design systems?
You guys got any similarly shitty project management system?1 -
Yay, nothing better than good ol' change request... Right?
Let's see...
Limit user's ability to do sth, if this condition is met, allow editing global parameter of this condtion, than add per action overrides, on top of that add per-user override, on top of that add per-user overrides to ignore certain overrides.
Shiit man, reading this took me 3-4 times and still Im not sure if I 100% understand
Okay, I think I got this.
setting
per-user ignore flag to setting
override to setting
per-user ignore flag to override to setting
override to override to setting
per-user ignore flag to override to override to setting
design assumption: automatic system that can make life easier
me: designed system to be fully automatic
every single change request: be less automatic, require more user manual and more attention to work2 -
Recently I've been tasked with setting up of a small /mid-size infrastructure and I've been documenting things like infrastructure design, network configuration all the way to playbooks and cluster configuration.
Since I just started with this, until now I have been doing this in a Google doc / some spread around markdown files. I would like to have a better way of having this documentation hosted internally..
I have been playing around with local installations of rtd, gitbook and mkdocs. So far, I've liked the simplicity and customizability of mkdocs.
Any other options before I commit myself to mkdocs?2 -
What if some one very cruel programmer programmed a programmer and designer AI that can generate code 700X faster, generate flawless and reliable code / design in any and Every programming language that could replace 100% of the programmers in the world?
What if he give it for free?
And companies started to fire all programmers and designers to download the free AI and use it and it was better than every programmer in the world?
What if the AI was able to code a whole Office suit and all Adobe products in just 3 seconds?
What if it was very intelligent that no one needs to hire a programmer ?
What if any one started to create their own app using it and replace programmers like car replaced horse?
What do you feel about it?
Do you wish if it happen?
Or not?
Is it your dream?
Or nightmare?17 -
I came to a new school this year and didn't know anyone. I found out that there is a kid who likes to code, so I tried getting friendly with him.
Well, he knows HTMl/CSS...
Well, he just does Wordpress...
Well, he actually likes design better...
I've seen someone else who was trying to learn JS, learn with him, and the kid couldn't wrap his head around what a function did...4 -
!rant (I got down voted for this on Stack Overflow, so I try to discuss the issue with a more professional crowd.)
In a Software Engineering class, we had an assignment to read Parnas' seminal paper on modularization [0]. In this paper, two approaches of dividing a software into modules are discussed:
Traditional Approach: A flow chart is drawn to work out the single processing steps and the program's high-level flow. Then every processing step is turned into a module. This approach doesn't yield very good results.
New Approach: Every design decision will be turned into a module by the means of information hiding. This approach leads to much better results.
My personal interpretation of the term design decision is that the modules are identified as data structures rather than as processing steps of an algorithm. This makes sense, because data structures are much more suitable for information hiding then processing steps of an algorithm. (The information inside a data structure is hidden behind functions, whereas a function only hides more detailed processing steps and no information; the information is actually passed in as arguments.)
Why does the second approach work so much better than the first approach? Here comes my second interpretation: The single processing steps of an algorithm are not replaceable (and thus not reusable), whereas it's possible to convert data structures into other data structures.
And here's my question: Could that be the reason why software development using workflow engines (based on BPMN, for example) never really took off?
My personal experience is that the activities created in such workflows are hardly ever reused, but there often are big data structures passed around all the involved activities, even if most of the activities use only one or two of them.
My question exaggerated: Could we get rid of all those clumsy workflow engines by giving managers Parnas' paper to read?
[0]: On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules (Parnas 1972)2 -
I love HTML and last night, I discovered Material Design Lite. It did not have many design features. So, I looked and found a better responsive website designer. Bootstrap looks great! I will making some website with it to learn some of it classes.3
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!rant
When your client has a better idea on how to design their website. But asking for impossible. Putting a 1900's portrait picture on a modern website and they want it to stretch the fvckin image. -
Architecture for Java REST API going to build/port from existing NodeJS one.
So Spring Boot + *
Lots of concurrent requests and large MongoDB calls. Current APIs use like 4GB memory for each instance because they don't use stream/pipe the response. Hold all data in memory and then return it all at once to user.
And well we expect more load in the future, so want to do this the right way.
So my understanding since this morning, is there's the blocking? MongoClient, (find* returns List) and now a Reactive MongoClient which is very async and like JS promises. Based on Pub, Sub model.
But the downside of JS promises was callback hell.
So actually 2 questions.
1. For each request, the db call done using the same MongoClient/db connection such that if there are 2 requests one would block the other?
2. Reactive Mongo would be non-blocking by design so would be better to support streamed responses?8 -
Spent half of the day redesigning proposed feature design. Somehow my Note skills are better than PowerPoint skills of someone with PHD in medicine.
Monday 🥂 -
see now this is the f-ing shit that pisses me off.
There is this project named dain.
One time I made a project that dropped frames using opencv or ffmpeg i can't remember, creating a test output file and ran them through dain to benchmark it for myself.
alot of things just like this actually I tended to do to get a better sense. Its the reason I abandoned the NN since I think I have a feel for how to design them for certain tasks and remember that with my 'successes' i was still really far off from where i'd like to be.
additionally there are other kinds of ml that interest me more that I am not seeing too much on... point is
I worked all this crap out
got wavenet working to check on it YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARS ago and because the dirty fucks out west kept stealing my stuff, i end up back at square one waiting for some douchebag to steal my stuff again who isn't even going to do anything but pretend he's straight or pretend everything has some faggot meaning. its very annoying. why do these people live this way again ?3 -
I can't stand when people spend a single day familiarizing themselves with a new technology or concept and then come to the conclusion that's it doesn't work and really the old way is great. Not saying all new things are better. In fact, I'm probably more in favor of tried and true methods than shiny new methods. But one day? Really? That's all it took? In this particular case it's code-first DB development. Again, I'm not a fan myself really. But I have a co-worker who said creating tables and and schemas is much harder using code-first instead of DB first. I mean... Neither are hard. I personally think it's easier for basic things like tables and schemas but either way it's not hard. Now SQL triggers and index's all that fun stuff? Yeah code first is probably more complicated (I'm clearly not a database expert or anything). But a day? Really? You know enough to force a design paradigm on the whole company now? Wtf.3
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Going through some code I was handed to do an emergency project... Think of an aspx site that follows no design rule, like database access directly in the code behind. No models ect. So I'm going through this section that calls a function good start. Open the function find a class that contain code to access the database.. Humm ok this part look better that the rest. Read the code that validates if it exist in the database and gets the type back. So far so good then there is a get details function call.... Open up the fct ... Started crying... There is a 200+ lines switch case that goes over the type previously fetched..... And the type is stringed compare in the biggest switch case I've ever seen.... Fthis... I'm out1
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{TL:DR/ a super non web dev non frontend non interested person aka me somehow cracked the interview(through wrong practices i guess) landed into an internship that would have gone to a better person.I cracked the interview but am shit scared if i could stand the job}
- So 3 days ago i was talking to my friend regarding random stuff, when he told about needing a front end dev for making static template based html pages for their company.
- (I haven't ever worked in deep with web dev, just generated a few websites using mardown to html convertors, and was recently trying to learn flask/bootstrap/js) I was in need of some work so immediately requested him to talk about me in their company.
- yesterday i get an interview call from the hr of that company . She ask what i know, what they want and if i could do. I honestly tell them about my experience with web dev( with some maybe's)
- moments later , she adds me to a group with another guy, and gives us both a task to use create a clone of same website in 2 days.
- The website is a super graphically designed web page with lots of animations, custom mouses and what not. I could sense the basic elements out of it , like the nav bar and the carousals, but those animations were way beyond my knowledge. yet i start working on it
- I try with taking the clever top down approach of cloning the website and fixing its structure. It has such long code files of 10k+ lines, but i was still able to clean the css and html files and some of js code to make the website work
- later my friend calls and tells me that the other guy is a 1st year student / his brother and he doesn't know much stuff so he's kinda like me.
- He shows me a video of his code that he sent to him. That guy took the honest, bottom up approach, used the design as inspiration and was trying hard to create the similar design and animations via js.
- among other things, he also tells me that this challenge is super difficult and the level of difficulty in the work is certainly going to be lesser than this.
- In my task, I was super stuck at js because i haven't learned it much, therefore after spending 1.5 days, i made a submission without the main thing, i.e one particular carousal working
- later I get a call from another friend (B) of mine and while discussing random things, i show him my code over anydesk and ask him if he could somehow get my code to work. He asks for some time and sends me a complete refactored version of code with the same design but fully working carousal and other stuff.
- meanwhile i get to see the other guy's code and he had legit made all the designs and functions by himself, but his code looked less polished and different from the design.
- I pushed my friend(B)'s refactored version and added a comment on the group the carousal in mu code is now working.
- later at night my friend1 calls and tells me that their company was considering my submission and i would be getting the selection call
- I feel like a crazy fraud who somehow cracked the interview but is going to get his ass whipped. Where and how can i learn js, and jquery?5 -
Can we acknowledge how devrant sucks in terms of UX/UI? I mean, the desktop feels like a lazy copy of a mobile app whereas the mobile web version doesn’t even have a menu( not even including the many other issues on mobile). Feels like the devs of devrant are more focused on ranting about their own job than coming up with a better design/ functionality and / or adding PWA support and are forcing us to use their app
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Am I doing something wrong in integrating bootstrap into my web design.
I'm just making some cool looking password reset forms and stuff.
1. Is it overkill?
2. Is there a better alternative?
3. Any good tutorials to understand bootstrap better than what I do know? (afaik it's just a collection of html elements and css styles)
4. I still have a problem with auto padding at different resolutions which messes up the alignments and stuff I'm really inexperienced at this.
5. I'm a noob at web UI and I want to add it to my skill set so I don't mind a good recommendation to some sort of path I can follow. (I'm alright with Photoshop concept designs, I'm bad at implementing them)4 -
I would end up on top of any other trend thing needed by humanity.
Possible outcomes:
- building better AI's, building better robots
- neural networking
- quantum computing
- robot dating service
- artificial life
- holodeck design and construction
- free energy (any kind)
- running a private space shipyard
- research into new and unknown technology
And last, if nothing works, I would open up a deli on Mars. The robots would make the food anyway, I would probably only program the menu and fix them when they malfunction. -
I know how to build mobile apps (design and apps themselves).
I want to open a small services company, but I realized that I will need a website with portfolio of the jobs I did. Im working on gathering a portfolio, but have no idea how to make a proper website for representing my services.
Popular choice seeems to be getting a wordpress theme for $50-$60 modifying it and that's all. Is there a better way to do this and look professional without hiring a web dev?6 -
Depends on what style means...
How I format the code: language, team/style-check rules, IDE auto format settings
How I structure my code and design programs: experience... Mainly from blowing stuff up, having to rewrite monolith code, trying to understand other people's shitty code and why they can't seem to organize it better so you don't need to be a surgeon or God to even attempt to figure out wtf it's doing and how it works... Or supposed to work. -
Design question for y'all
Context: python lambda
Better to make classes for dictionary objects holding strings between methods
Throw strings around separately
Throw the dictionary around6 -
I'm building a web application, and I'm currently working on the account registration code, and I could use some design advice. In your opinion, is it better to say "username/email address in use" when one or both are in use, or would it be best to specify whether the username or email address are in use? Why?1
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I thought you had to be great in the computer fields before your friends started asking to make their idea games. Just happened to me this morning.
Friend: Hey let's make an MMORPG!
Me: Bro that would take years...
F: Hmmm... fine then just an RPG.
M: *in my head* cuz that really changes things, it's still an RPG...
M: Lemme hear your idea
F: *proceeds to describe Fallout /but better/
F: And I'm willing to learn game design an hour or two a day
Idk how to make him realize that it takes money, time and more than two people!! -
I need just a bit of advice.
I am working with node.js and React and mongoDb
I just want that please take a look at my schema architecture (Specially for address) for profile and suggest me which is better
Approach 1 :
https://paste.centos.org/view/...
The things that scared me with this approach. I tried this also But it become unnecessary headaches to insert address and then query address as it is nested schema .
Also if you check this out
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...
[Answer by Konstantin Smolyanin (Long Version))]
One must not considered nested state in react.
Approach 2
https://paste.centos.org/view/...
I can store address into another collection
Also is there any reference sites where I can learn about schema architecture or database design with practical scenarios.
Thanks for reading out.4 -
You know my earliest design relating to ML was something intended to mimic human evolution by creating large trees of ideas and rules regarding emotions and how they regulated decisions and priorities.
I somehow think that was a better approach. It was more complex but it was better.
and i could reproduce the stolen diagram from memory as well.
hey is it illegal for someone to sell the contents of a storage locker with your birth certificate in it ?2 -
Thinking very VERY seriously about pushing the button on this.
iMac 10-core Xeon W, 64GB DDR4, Radeon Pro Vega 64X, 2TB SSD
$6,727 plus tax $403.62 and then another hundred for shipping before fucking December in 'rona.
Could sign up for Apple Pay and do $600 payments for 12 months 0 APR... shouldn't be too bad of a problem provided the world holds together that long... And if it doesn't, then this is my last computer... and I guess it'd be nice to go into the afterworld with a freshly upgraded rig.
IDK, Please talk some sense into me about how stupid this would be.
Also to factor in... I need to buy a new machine one way or another SOON. Or else I need to wipe my main and be out of commission for at least 3-4 days which could cost me a few grand on its own... and then also still buy a lesser mac for my daughter.
Why an iMac and not a cheese grater similarly priced? If I get the iMac I can give my current iMac to my daughter for school. My old 2015 iMac isn't holding up to my use anymore, but should be fine for a few more years for a high schooler to work on. If I get a cheese grader fine, but factor in at least another $300 for a minimum 27" 2K monitor.
Any reason to even think of a refurb trash can design? Are they too old now?
General thoughts on why this entire rant is retarded? Like. I too dislike Apple, but I need them. It's love/hate. But god if I do this I'm buckling in for the next 5 years... tax write off would be nice I guess.
Can't really back down the specs any because I dual boot windows and do some gaming. Need 2TB so I can give Windows and Mac a TB each (and I still have 8TB external).
Don't really want to go lower than the Vega 64X because even that benchmarks poorly against many cheaper cards... for gaming (but does do better for some other tasks)...
Ugh... talk me into or out of buying another god awful expensive mac.26 -
DevOps With Ruby and Chef on FreeBSD (and Linux)
I am Ops and Dev by heart. I have always automated *nix systems long before any automation framework was invented because I am pretty lazy. Doing stuff more than once manually is just one time too often for me. Imho Ruby is a really elegant language. The same applies for the tools that are built around it. The Chef ecosystem fits into this with its own elegance and stability perfectly because the server is Erlang driven and the rest is Ruby.
Being a Linux and BSD user since the early 90s I have always loved a *nix system for it's concepts and simplicity. One command for exactly one purpose and everything is combineable like letters are combinable to words in my mother language. I have always loved FreeBSD more though. Imho it is even more focused on simplicity. Because it is a really clean approach of system design that envies a base system and keeps 3rd party separated in a clean way for example. It also values classic UNIX philosophies that most Linux distros these days abandon but which saved my life multiple times through better design and execution that also focuses alot more on stability, fault tolerance and ease of use than any Linux I have come across. The hardcore guys should read "Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System", compare the readings to the Linux way of things and see for themselves.*
*The author acknowledges that this text is his opinion and just his wet dream alone and may not be of any relevance for the sexual lifes of everybody else -
So I'm a beginner Android Developer and I am planning to pursue some side projects to improve my skills. But the problem is Since my design skills are very poor , all of my applications look super ugly. I want them to look a little better so they are presentable. Can anybody guide me in which direction should I head ?2
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It's been over 7 months of being deployed to help finish a project that's crossed the deadline umpteenth times. There's only this guy who had started on this project and me as developers. He's a nice guy, but I'm finding him to be a snowflake that's extremely difficult to work with. Every time I mention a critical problem with his original design, or the approaches he takes on this project, he takes it personally. He would pour out a long spiel of why this and why that, and waste most of the meeting time. Or he would run to his outdated diagrams or documents that he had created himself somewhere deep in the wiki forest, and use that as a defense. He creates his own user stories and tasks on a whim with no PM supervision. I've noted to the managers that this is a project to fail, and all they've done is assign a busy PM to this project, and the new PM is perfectly fine w/ the way the project has been handled so far.
I point out a small flaw with his assumptions just the other day, and he even managed to hyperventilate and again fall back to his outdated document... WTF? I'd rather start from scratch and get this project finished faster.. and even though I've expressed my objection to continue on this path, the managers foolishly believe that this project will be completed somehow. I don't hate my development partner, or PM, or people in the management, but I hate the fact that I don't have control over so many aspects of this project, including the half-assed, unnecessarily complex design, and the dev workflow itself. I feel like I'm tied to a car that's being thrown over the cliff, and assigned to fix the junky car w/ its engine broken before the car hits the ground. Something like this would never be allowed to go in a commercial sector. I just wish that the management could just give me control over project as THE lead & PM over this project, and get this project tied up for good, and with better reusability and quality.1 -
Sophomore year starting soon so I'm looking for new project (s) to complete in parallel with the studies.
Some are more design-y and some more backend-y but I recently started getting better at designing so :)
1) Learn some fragment shader stuff. I've always been messing around with graphics and have a game on steam, so I think that's a good idea to be paired with signal processing.
2) Reactive web services. Preferably with spring-boot or vert.x but
3) I would also like to dive into golang (and make some reactive thing with it)
4) WebAssembly seems nice... But I got some concerns
5) exercise making wireframes -> CSS (with some js)
6) I've never really done any real backed work with nodejs, except serving and aot compiling js, or doing gulp tasks
7) Implementing a whole project, or a fraction of it as serverless on aws
* I'm definitely going to use a couple very simple services to make a docker swarm with load balancing, etc, just because I know how everything works but got no practical knowledge
8) Design an esports jersey for the university department I'm in (shouldn't take long)
So what do you guys think? Recommendations are welcome :)
P.S. last year in review:
> A webapp running on a raspberry pi powering a reflex testing game on gpio (java/spring-boot , codename: buttonmasher)
> small Elastic search cluster to monitor some random university servers through kibana dashboards
> laser tracking on wall of *any* colour and variable light conditions via a webcam (opencv) , controlling the mouse pointer, whether you run it against a projector or any wall
> jstrain.herokuapp.com => a small JavaScript powered tool with a DSL to help you train more efficiently without a coach
> Various random Photoshop stuff -
I equate design to usability. A bad design and UI = bad usability.
For our current project I gave some feedback on issues I had with the presentation, citing usability problems because the design is wrong and I wanted to spend more time designing it in a way that makes sense and flows better.
My boss and manager responded with "functionality over design". And if they want a better design they have to pay more. But that means giving them a product that is overly messy and complicated to use. It wouldn't be a big job to improve the design.
Any thoughts on this? -
9 Ways to Improve Your Website in 2020
Online customers are very picky these days. Plenty of quality sites and services tend to spoil them. Without leaving their homes, they can carefully probe your company and only then decide whether to deal with you or not. The first thing customers will look at is your website, so everything should be ideal there.
Not everyone succeeds in doing things perfectly well from the first try. For websites, this fact is particularly true. Besides, it is never too late to improve something and make it even better.
In this article, you will find the best recommendations on how to get a great website and win the hearts of online visitors.
Take care of security
It is unacceptable if customers who are looking for information or a product on your site find themselves infected with malware. Take measures to protect your site and visitors from new viruses, data breaches, and spam.
Take care of the SSL certificate. It should be monitored and updated if necessary.
Be sure to install all security updates for your CMS. A lot of sites get hacked through vulnerable plugins. Try to reduce their number and update regularly too.
Ride it quick
Webpage loading speed is what the visitor will notice right from the start. The war for milliseconds just begins. Speeding up a site is not so difficult. The first thing you can do is apply the old proven image compression. If that is not enough, work on caching or simplify your JavaScript and CSS code. Using CDN is another good advice.
Choose a quality hosting provider
In many respects, both the security and the speed of the website depend on your hosting provider. Do not get lost selecting the hosting provider. Other users share their experience with different providers on numerous discussion boards.
Content is king
Content is everything for the site. Content is blood, heart, brain, and soul of the website and it should be useful, interesting and concise. Selling texts are good, but do not chase only the number of clicks. An interesting article or useful instruction will increase customer loyalty, even if such content does not call to action.
Communication
Broadcasting should not be one-way. Make a convenient feedback form where your visitors do not have to fill out a million fields before sending a message. Do not forget about the phone, and what is even better, add online chat with a chatbot and\or live support reps.
Refrain from unpleasant surprises
Please mind, self-starting videos, especially with sound may irritate a lot of visitors and increase the bounce rate. The same is true about popups and sliders.
Next, do not be afraid of white space. Often site owners are literally obsessed with the desire to fill all the free space on the page with menus, banners and other stuff. Experiments with colors and fonts are rarely justified. Successful designs are usually brilliantly simple: white background + black text.
Mobile first
With such a dynamic pace of life, it is important to always keep up with trends, and the future belongs to mobile devices. We have already passed that line and mobile devices generate more traffic than desktop computers. This tendency will only increase, so adapt the layout and mind the mobile first and progressive advancement concepts.
Site navigation
Your visitors should be your priority. Use human-oriented terms and concepts to build navigation instead of search engine oriented phrases.
Do not let your visitors get stuck on your site. Always provide access to other pages, but be sure to mention which particular page will be opened so that the visitor understands exactly where and why he goes.
Technical audit
The site can be compared to a house - you always need to monitor the performance of all systems, and there is always a need to fix or improve something. Therefore, a technical audit of any project should be carried out regularly. It is always better if you are the first to notice the problem, and not your visitors or search engines.
As part of the audit, an analysis is carried out on such items as:
● Checking robots.txt / sitemap.xml files
● Checking duplicates and technical pages
● Checking the use of canonical URLs
● Monitoring 404 error page and redirects
There are many tools that help you monitor your website performance and run regular audits.
Conclusion
I hope these tips will help your site become even better. If you have questions or want to share useful lifehacks, feel free to comment below.
Resources:
https://networkworld.com/article/...
https://webopedia.com/TERM/C/...
https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/...
https://macsecurity.net/view/...
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