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Search - "front end rants > other rants"
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Its that time of the morning again where I get nothing done and moan about the past ... thats right its practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
Today I'd like to tell you the story of "i". Interesting about "I" is that he was actually a colleague of yesterdays nominee "G" (and was present at the "java interface" video call, and agreed with G!): https://devrant.com/rants/1152317/...
"I" was the spearhead of a project to end all projects in that company. It was suppose to be a cross-platform thing but ended up only working for iOS. It was actually quite similar to this: https://jasonette.com/ (so similar i'm convinced G / I were part of this but I can't find their github ID's in it).
To briefly explain the above + what they built ... this is the worst piece of shit you can imagine ... and thats a pretty strong statement looking back at the rest of this series so far!
"I" thought this would solve all of our problems of having to build similar-ish apps for multiple customers by letting us re-use more code / UI across apps. His main solution, was every developers favourite part of writing code. I mean how often do you sit back and say:
"God damn I wish more of this development revolved around passing strings back and forth. Screw autocomplete, enums and typed classes / variables, I want more code / variables inside strings in this library!"
Yes thats right, the main part of this bullshittery was putting your entire app, into JSON, into a string and downloading it over http ... what could possibly go wrong!
Some of my issues were:
- Everything was a string, meaning we had no autocomplete. Every type and property had to be remembered and spelled perfectly.
- Everything was a string so we had no way to cmd + click / ctrl + click something to see somethings definition.
- Everything was a string so any business logic methods had to be remembered, all possible overloaded versions, no hints at param types no nothing.
- There was no specific tooling for any of this, it was literally open up xcode, create a json file and start writing strings.
- We couldn't use any of the native UI builders ... cause strings!
- We couldn't use any of the native UI layout constructs and we had to use these god awful custom layout managers, with a weird CSS feel to them.
What angered me a lot was their insistence that "You can download a new app over http and it will update instantly" ... except you can't because you can't download new business logic only UI. So its a new app, but must do 100% exactly the same thing as before.
His other achievements include:
- Deciding he didn't like apple's viewController and navigationBar classes and built his own, which was great when iOS 7 was released (changed the UI to allow drawing under the status bar) and we had no access to any of apples new code or methods, meaning everything had to be re-built from scratch.
- On my first week, my manager noticed he fucked up the login error handling on the app I was taking over. He noticed this as I was about to leave for the evening. I stayed so we could call him (he was in an earlier timezone). Rather than deal with his fucked up, he convinced the manager it would be a "great learning experience" for me to do it ... and stay in late ... while he goes home early.
- He once argued with me in front of the CEO, that his frankenstein cross-platform stuff was the right choice and that my way of using apples storyboards (and well thought out code) wasn't appropriate. So I challenged him to prove it, we got 2 clients who needed similar apps, we each did it our own way. He went 8 man weeks over, I came in 2 days under and his got slated in the app store for poor performance / issues. #result.
But rather than let it die he practically sucked off the CEO to let him improve the cross platform tooling instead.
... in that office you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a retard.
Having had to spend a lot more time working with him and more closely than most of the other nominees, at a minimum "I" is on the top of my list for needing a good punch in the face. Not for being an idiot (which he is), not for ruining so much (which he did), but for just being such an arrogant bastard about it all, despite constant failure.
Will "I" make it to most incompetent? Theres some pretty stiff competition so far
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!6 -
When you start a new job as a Senior Developer, and start asking questions about the code, and you have these collections of conversations with other front-end people:
Exhibit 1:
Me: Ahh so I see the filtering and pagination is all done with Javascript in the front end...
Random dev: No, it's done with Angular.
Exhibit 2:
Me: I think we should add frontend pagination to this page. There will be too many elements on it if you're a customer with 2000 servers.
Random dev: Don't bother, there's no pagination in the API call... So that will not gain any performance.
Me: But it wouldn't take long to implement and it would improve the user experience, why would you want to show ALL the elements, when you have an option not to... Also, it WILL be a major performance hit, especially on mobile.
Random dev: People will use search anyway.
😥🔪
Also, there are no coding standards, every file looks different, and my opinion is being disregarded in everything, and I thought my last job was bad...
Seriously how are some people hired as front-enders?
Since I just took this job, I feel obligated to stay a couple of months... But hey, don't cry for me, I might have more rants for you. 😂
Sorry for the long rant, here's cake: 🍰5 -
I've seen several rants about dumb/useless teachers, college and the CS degree studies; today is a good day to vent out some "old" memories.
Around two semesters ago I enrolled in a Database seminar with this guy, a tall geek from the 80's with a squeaky voice, so squeaky mice could had an aneurysm if they listened to him.
Either way this guy was a mess, he said he was an awesome coder, that we were still "peasants" when it came to coding, that relational databases had nothing on him since he was an awesome freelancer and did databases every day, that we had to redo the programming course with him and with his shitty, pulled out of the ass own C++ style guide with over 64 different redacted rules.
He gave us sample code of "how it should be done" in Java...it ain't my favorite language but fuck me a fucking donkey could have written better code with his ass!! He even rewrote Java's standard input function and made it highly inefficient. He still wrote in a structural paradigm in OOP languages! And he dared to make this code reviews were he would proyect someone's code and mock it in front of the class as he took off points, sometimes going to the negative realm (3,2,1,0,-1...)
But you know what's shittier? That he actually didn't even attend, 90% of the time, it was literally this:
> Good morning class
> Checks attendance. . .
> I'll be back, I'm going to check in...
> 1 hour 45 minutes later (class was 2 hrs long) - comes back
> do you have any doubts?
> O.o no...? I'm ok.
> We're done
Not only that, he scheduled from 4 to 17 homeworks throughout the week, I did the math, that was around 354 files from everyone; of course he didn't check them, other students from higher semesters did and they gained each point taken from students making students from lower semesters get the short end of the stick.
How did I pass? He didn't understood my code or database schema and he knew he couldn't fail me as he had no ground to stand on.
Thanks for listening, if you got to the end of this long ass post and had a similar experience I'd love to read it.13 -
First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.
Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)
Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.
So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.
Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.
Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)5 -
Hello devRanters. I'm new to this community but I've already started feeling comfortable here. You guys are great!
I don't understand why there are more rants about front end developers. I hardly see any rant by a system developer or a security analyst.10 -
I need some advice, because I'm feeling like I'm getting ripped off by my company.
I'm a junior developer and this is the first company I've every worked at. I've been here for 1 1/2 year. I said in the first interview that I am proficient with a fullstack framework, for a rather niche programming language, but I don't want to do front end, because I'm not good at it and I generally don't like it.
I'm the sole coder working on a project that costs the client 100EUR/h. There are others, but they just organize the tasks I have to do. This project requires me to work a full stack of retardation server, that's a pain in the ass, not really compatible with this project and required hack after hack to be fixed. Finding bugs in this pile of shit often takes days of emailing around and asking for logs in hope something might pop up. I've had to scavage through threads saying the still bleed form the anus or have PTSD, beccause of this retarded stack. As you can imagine, I'm also responsible for all of the QA and obviously get shit for bugs. I'm supposed to remember every little detail I've done in this project at the end of the sprint, while also working on 2-3 other projects simutaniously.
I've developed some small servers with dashboard and api for apps on my own. I'm supposed to also do all of the QA so that my boss doesn't see any errors, because otherwise our clients have to be QA.
I have written a complicated chat system that is distributed across nodes. We've nearly missed a deadline of 6 days for this shit, because I've been put under preasure, because I estimated such a "large" amount of time for this.
Other things I've done include:
* Login/Registration on many projects
* Possibility to add accounts for subordinated, with a full permission system for every resource
* Live product configuration with server validation and realtime price updates
* Wallet & transaction system, dealing with purchases of said product and various other services offered on this platform
* Literally replaced the old, abandoned database framework from a project with a modern one.
I've made some mistakes during the WFH corona times, but this that doesn't mean you can put more preasure on me and pull stuff like this: https://devrant.com/rants/2498161 https://devrant.com/rants/2479761
Is all of what I'm doing and have to deal with worth the 9EUR/h salary?10 -
To all that read my rants regarding my webshop before! Here's the long awaited update!
So this asshole partner did just not take care of business so I decided to stand down as a director for that company. So we arranged that last monday.
I thought: let's end this properly, clean up my mail, some other stuff... tuesday he revoked me access to everything, so I couldn't access anything anymore. Wow fucker! You never did a thing and now suddenly you take action? Wtf?!
Can you please pay your part of the bill for the accountant? You already promised a couple of times.
Well of course mr retard, you really think I'll follow up on my promises? You never kept 1 of them yet expect me to keep that promise? Fuck you man.
So today he asked again. I told him that I'd like to know what he wants with all the custom made stuff as I developed it and copyright is owned by me. Then mr asshole started insulting again: just because of the fact that you're not a front end dev doesn't mean that makes.up for you taking so much time.to implement all that. I asked an expert.and he could do it in 3 hours! Wow dude! A front end dev optimizing db queries, rewriting parts of the back end in just.3 hours including the front-end?,You're so right.
Of course not cunt face. I'm already full stacking for 20 fucking years and.you tell me that?! Really? Mr insult's back again!
Then he says: I'm so fed up with all this crap that to end this properly I will have my new IT business partner look at your so called 'custom made components'.
For fuck's sake man, can I send you a tree with a rope so that you can hang yourself?
Good luck getting your domain name as it is still registered on my company's name. I might cancel it someday in the future at my convenience.
If anyone here loves fucking up a website, get in touch with me.1 -
In reply to:
https://devrant.com/rants/3957914/...
Okay, we must first establish common ground here. What do we understand about "showing"? I understand you probably mean displaying/rendering, more abstractly: "obtaining". Good, now we move on.
What's the point of a front-end? Well, in the 90's that used to be an easy answer: to share information (not even in a user-friendly way, per se). Web 2.0 comes, interaction with the website. Uh-oh, suddenly we have to start minding the user. Web 3.0 comes, ouch, now the front-end is a mini-backend. Even tougher, more leaks etc. The ARPAnet was a solution, a front-end that they had built in order to facilitate research document-sharing between universities. Later, it became the inter(national) net(work).
First there was SGML to structure the data (it's a way of making it 'pretty' in a lexicographical way) and turn it into information (which is what information is: data with added semantics) and later there was HTML to structure it even further, yet we all know that its function was not prettification, but rather structure. Later came CSS, to make it pretty. With its growing popularity, the web started to be used as a publishing device.
source:
https://w3.org/Style/CSS20/...
If we are to solely display JSON data in a pretty way, we may be limiting ourselves to the scenario of rendering pretty web pages using aesthetic languages such as CSS. We must also understand that if we are only focusing on making a website pretty with little to moderate functionality, we aren't really winning. A good website has to be a winner in all aspects, which is why frameworks came into existence, but.. lmao, let's leave that to another discussion.
Now let me recall back my college days.. front-end.. front-end.. heck, even a headset can be a front-end to a pick-order backend. We must think back to the essence, to the abstract. All other things are just implementations of it (yes, the horrendous thousands of Javascript libraries, lol).
So, my college notes say:
"Presentation layer: this is the UI.
In this layer you ask the middle tier for information, which gets that information from a database, which then goes back to middle tier, back to presentation. In the case of the headset, the operators can confirm an order is ready. This is essentially the presentation tier again: you're getting information from the middle tier and 'presenting it' as it were.
The presentation layer is in essence the question: how do I bring my application data to my end users in a platform-and solution-independent way?"
What's JSON? A way to transport data between the middle tier and the presentation tier. Is that what frontend development is? Displaying it in a pretty way? I don't think it is, because 'pretty' is an extra feature of obtaining and displaying data. Do we always have to display data in a pretty way? Not necessarily. We could write a front-end script (in NodeJS perhaps) that periodically fetches certain information from a middle-tier is serves a more functional role rather than a rendering one.
The prettification of data was a historical consequence of the popularity of the web (which is a front-end) (see second paragraph with link). Since the essence of a front-end is to obtain information from the back-end (with stress on obtaining), its presentation is not necessarily a defining characteristic of it, but rather an optional and solution-dependent aspect, a facet.4 -
Rant #1
I’ve got a new client wanting me to take over their website, okay... I’ll take care of you.
What’s the hold up?
1. Anon, Get ahold of this person, they’ve got the info you’ll need.
2. We will get together sometime to go over paperwork.
3. We are waiting on the board to sign off on a contract switch.
4. I’m needing this changed immediately on the site or we will be fined, but I understand you don’t have the information to make that change - can you get ahold of X to get the information?
5. *gets ahold of X* - still waiting on Y to approve contract release and change.
Listen, I have my faults too on running my own business but at least I know what I can and can’t do when either accepting or turning away a client. I’d be happy to work on your website, but you’ve got to get approval from those on your team before you make a change, that’s not on me. It’s cool that you need whatever changed on your site before the end of the week, but I can’t help you until I’m officially signed on. Please don’t request content change when I don’t have access to the content to change it.
Go get approval by your team first before you call me about making changes to your site, we haven’t even exchanged any information or paperwork yet.
Rant #2
If you call me again knowing that I’m on a two month leave from work, I’ll slit your throat and fuck the wound. It’s 1:40. There are other techs, you’ve got the on-call list in front of you. I’m flattered you went through the trouble of finding my PERSONAL NUMBER, but I have rants to write damn it.