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Well, it happened. The stupidest request, no demand, I have ever, and most likely will ever receive...
Me: So what is it you're looking to do with your website.
Client: We're not showing up Facebook's home page. We need you to fix that. We have a budget of $10,000 to make this happen right now.
Me: As much as I'd love to take your money, that isn't something I can control. Every "home page" is profile-based, which technically isn't a homepage, but a "feed" that changes constantly. So say you create a profile on Facebook, only those you follow, and paid posts show up on your feed. What I can do however is use your budget to create and promote posts from your company page to show on users' feeds. If you're serious about marketing, we can start slow at $250/week, then work our way up or down based on results until your budget is exhausted, then re-evaluate the budget at that time. I can tailor a retainer for you based on the number of ads per week that you'd like to make.
Client: No, this is not what we're asking for at all.
Me: Okay...what is it you're looking for exactly? Run through this in as much detail as possible so I can get on the same page.
Client: We want to be on the main home page of facebook.com. We want our logo on that page when people sign up to make an account, linking to our website.
Me: That's simply not possible. That's Facebook's own home page. Nobody has a right to edit that other than Facebook itself.
Client: Bullshit. There's a Facebook developers section with APIs to edit and view Facebook's entire website. We would do it ourselves, but we signed up and don't understand how to change it in Chrome. That's why we need you and [referring client] said you were the best guy for our needs.
Me: That API has no control over Facebook's corporate data, including their own home page. That API designed ONLY for sections in which you are authorized to access or modify, such as your personal profile or created page for your business.
Client: We know that it can be done. If you don't do it, we'll find someone else who can.
Me: Well good luck with that, because the only way it would be remotely possible to do that WILL involve prison time, since that would be illegal. The only legal way to do it would be to buy Facebook, and they'll laugh you out of the building with that offer. But I'm done with this conversation because I have work to complete from clients that aren't delusional. Have a nice day! [hang up]
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What. The. Fuck.26 -
Sometimes I wonder how compromised my parents online security would be without my intervention.
My mom logged into her gmail and there was an red bar on top informing about Google preventing an attempted login from an unknown device.
Like typical parents / old people, that red bar didn't caught her attention but I noticed it immediately. I took over and looked into it. It showed an IP address and a location that was quite odd.
I went ahead with the Account security review and I was shocked to find that she had set her work email address as the recovery email!!
I explained her that work email accounts cannot be trusted and IT department of the workplace can easily snoop emails and other info on that email address and should not be related to personal accounts.
After fixing that issue, me being a typical skeptic and curious guy, I decided to find more info about that IP address.
I looked up the IP address on a lookup website and it showed an ISP that was related to the corporate office of her workplace. I noticed the location Google reported also matched with the corporate office location of her work.
Prior to this event, few days ago, I had made her change her gmail account password to a more secure one. ( Her previous password was her name followed by birth date!! ). This must have sent a notification to the recovery mail address.
All these events are connected. It is very obvious that someone at corporate office goes through employees email addresses and maybe even abuse those information.
My initial skeptism of someone snooping throguh work email addresses was right.
You're welcome mom!9 -
My bosses have estimated 5 (five!) days to start & finish a corporate website (no wordpress) for one of our clients.
However, we don't even have images and texts :)
This will be funny6 -
My fellow coworker dev just sent a staging site link to our CFO to review some new functionality...
CFO clicks on our corporate HQ link in coworker's email signature instead and berates coworker for sending him the wrong link...
This person is somewhat largely in charge of making decisions that affect our digital marketing, website budgets, and strategy.
I can't make this shit up.6 -
LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR
* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *
30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*
*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *
"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."
My first reaction:
"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."
Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.
Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."
I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:
In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.
I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?
Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.
Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!
I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"1 -
My team manager showed me a web application of a new client and asked me if I can find vulnerabilities in it to push for a better product contract. She showed me the system architecture and asked me if I could try finding something from their login page. I politely refused since we don't have written permission to conduct a security audit (it's also a ministry website). She was pretty disappointed and idk if I'm doing the right thing not helping the company (I'm an intern but still). I'm sure I can scan in stealth but I don't think it's ethical on a corporate level. Thoughts?11
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This is how beautiful corporate is -
I talked to my cousin recently who works in an MNC. He told me about a team member who was assigned a Google Login integration task on the website. They already had a username/password combo working.
That team member took 2 months for it. Every week on the team wide meeting he took an off day and kept saying he was 'stuck' on the task and he's figuring it out.
2 months later, he completed the task and got compliments from the manager that he 'worked day and night' and overcame his struggles. Then he got a week off for his 'efforts'.
Just kill me at this point.2 -
So I own a small business that is a licensee of about a few hundred other ones. I wanted a mail list from the corporate office and they wanted to charge me. (we already pay them hundreds if not thousands a month) So I wrote a python script to scrape their website and get the info for free. I love programming!3
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They asked to me build corporate website with Registration, Social login, API integration, Maps, Distance calculator, Weather, Currency convertor, etc. Using WordPress.
I don't know whether I am f@#*ed or doomed or something else.2 -
I built a fairly simple database and website to showcase school curriculum “reader” books searchable and sortable by levels of difficulty and other metadata. I didn’t think much of it when I was building it but apparently it won the company a few million bucks in revenues once it launched. The big wigs rewarded that by selecting me as one of a few folks that got to go to a big corporate retreat in the Bahamas. This was before the company management went to crap and stopped incentivizing innovations at the employee level.
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!rant
Just had a meeting with a client. Client is a local company but they hired a new guy and he is a foreigner. They made a website with us. Since it is a typical corporate website with few pages and just text and images as content, we used WordPress.
The new guy is familiar with squarespace and asked me my opinion on using SS. I don't really find any issue and it was my reply. He seemed surprised and asked me "Wouldn't it be like losing your business?"
I have never considered developing WordPress as my business. Programming is my interest and profession. But my main passion is to provide solutions to anyone in need. In fact, there were many occasions where I told to clients they shouldn't buy our services and recommend other services including competitors.
He probably thinks I'm a strange guy. -
I'm way past the point of being pissed now....
So there's some software (API's, mobile app + website) that I wrote to manage supplier incentive programs in a big hurry last year - which lead to a bunch of stuff being hard-coded in to launch on time. So after last years promotion was done I took down all the services etc was very fucking clear that in order to finish & deploy it to run again I would need at least around 4 months notice.
On the surface its pretty simple but it has quite a large user base and controls the distribution of enough cash & prizes to buy a small country so the setup of the incentives/access/audit trails is not something to be taken lightly.
Then once I'm done with the setup I have to hand it over to be "independently audited" by 3 of the larger corporate behemoths who's cash it distributes (if I get a reply from one in 3-4 weeks it's pretty fast).
I only happened to find out by chance an hour ago that we are apparently launching an even larger program this year - ON FUCKING MONDAY. I literally happened to over hear this on my way for a smoke - they have been planning it since last year November and not one person thought it might be kinda important to let me know because software is "magic" and appears and works based on the fucking lunar cycle. -
For : Web devs, especially corporate website developers. (home, about, services, contact pages with content update features, bla bla)
Question : Is there an open sourced PHP solution between Wordpress and Laravel?
Reasons
- I do not want full framework like laravel for such simple website.
- Laravel is too much and heavy for standard corporate websites and not all clients can afford ssh-enabled servers.
- I do not want full CMS features like plugins, themes, etc from Wordpress.
- Wordpress themeing is not super difficult but also not as simple as Laravel's blades.
- I also don't wanna go static since the content update needs to be dynamic.
- I am willing to write own templates, CRUDs in minimal approach just for specific parts based on clients requirements.
- I want something that can easily host on shared hosting. (do not have to worry about composer and ssh)
Any thought?8 -
I think UPS' Api documentation and service must be the worst documented and build API I have ever seen from a corporate.
1. The developer website is a mess. A total mess. You can barely find the API type you are looking for.
2. When you get the API and download the documentation, the files, .pdf etc is still a mess. Pages long that most are craps.
3. Each request returns Status Code 200. Even if it is an error. This blew my mind.
4. Each request, based on error type or based on tracking activity returns different JSON schema.
For example, the JSON Schema for a shipment in transit is different from JSON schema for a shipment that has been delivered. A shipment that has been returned, a shipment that required signature etc. They are different from each other.
5. And the worst. They do not provide with test tracking codes. I have found some on internet, but they do not work in development and production environment.4 -
This is a rant about the passion of programming and building in the business world (AKA corporate/startup world)
I speak for myself and I believe many programmers out there who set out on their journey into the world of programming by a certain interest kindled some time when they first wrote their first line of code. We innocently eager, and dream of working for large fancy companies and start making money while doing the thing we love doing the most.
And then... reality hits. We find that most companies are basically just the same thing. Our supposedly creative and mind-challenging passion is now turned into mundane boring repetitive tasks and dealing with all kinds of bazaar demands and requirements. You suddenly go from wanting to change the world to "please move this to left by 10 px". And from experience that drives people to the extent of hating their jobs, and hating the very thing they were once so very infatuated with.
One narrative I see being pushed down the throats of developers (especially fresh young eager developers with no experience) mostly by business people/owners is "WORK FOR PASSION!". I personally heard one CEO say things like "It's not just about a salary at the end of the month. IT IS ABOUT A MISSION. IT IS ABOUT A VISION"...bla...bla...bla. Or "We don't work for money we work for passion". Yeah good luck keeping your business afloat on passion.
What irritates me the most about this, is that it is working. People today are convinced that doing shit jobs for these people are all about passion. But no one wants to stop for a second and think that maybe if people are passionate about something, even if that thing is in the field in which they work, they're not passionate about working for someone else doing something they hate? If I am really working for "passion" why don't I just quit and go work on something that I am ACTUALLY passionate about? Something that brings me joy not dread? It's a simple question but it's baffling to me why no one thinks about it. To me personally, jobs are just that; jobs. It's something to make a living and that's it. I don't give a fuck if you think you're building the next "innovative", "disruptive", "shitluptive" thing :D. Unfortunately that is viewed as "negative limited mentality".
I am quite passionate about programming and making things, but I am not so passionate about building your stupid app/website with a glue code everywhere!2 -
Bought fucking nvidia gpu to test speed of some fucking machine learning models that generate speech.
6 hours wasted already for installing fucking dependencies
cuda, fucking tensorflow gpu, bezel and other shit
Fucking resetting password to download deb with cudnn,
really ??????? fucking emails are not delivered to my fucking mailbox
After mass click of send email and multiple account ban and unban I figured out I should login to nvidia website and then allow access to fucking developer every time I want to log in there - fuck shit
Uninstalling everything now looking for fucking compatible versions between software.
10 years in this business still fucking installation of dependencies is most difficult part
Fucking corporate business and their shitty installation instructions to fuck up peoples lives and switch them to the cloud.
Same was with fucking kubernetes
Fucking software dependency hell
It’s worse then ever before.
Fuck ....3 -
Would you use react to create something like a static corporate website?
If not, with which framework/ technology would you do it?10 -
I love it when developers and designers say "we've build our own UI-framework/ online living styleguide" and how that was a lot of work and it just consists of: Input, Button, some headlines and colors. And it also does not grow a tiny module/bit the next 3 years. And if you ask to add a new button-size everybody is just like "Noooooo, we already have two sizes! Isn't that enough? Do you really need one more? Doesn't this dilute the overall display of the corporate design on the website?" Because for real it is not a living online styleguide that automatically transports changes to every site as intended in the first place but is rather a small bundle of HTML- and CSS-Snippets...
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Back in the early noughties I had an interview for the new job. A couple days before the interview I've visited that company's website. There was search input. Of cause I've entered some hacky things into it. And after several attempts I hacked it. The site was down in an infinite loop.
Two days later I told interviewer about the bug and what I did to reproduce it. He was surprised and checked the website. It was still down the same way.
I was totally ashamed. I was supposed to report that problem somehow.
BTW I got the job:) -
So I'm building this environmental monitoring system for one of the Labs to monitor Temperature and Humidity. the "software" that comes as part of the package with these sensors is really just a website you host yourself if you don't choose the cloud option. No big deal really, (see my previous rant about getting windows server through SSC) I setup IIS and get the "software" registered get a couple sensors running looks good. However I don't like the error messages that popup because it's unsecured. do some reading and I find out that most browsers will give you a warning if your not using HTTPS even if it's for internal use only. OK we'll how hard can it be in implement encryption, turns out it's not that hard and you can do it for free how with letsencrypt and other places. I like free, now i have to use SSH to get into the server and run an ACME client. Hey open SSH is part of windows now cool, download an ACME client SSH into the server and nope doesn't work. Oh right I'm behind a corporate firewall and a bunch of other shit I can't control. Why is so damn arduous to setup this god dam internal website and the problems aren't even the site. Now I'm playing with AWS spinning up an instance to be able to try and get an SSL certificate just so i don't have to tell people it's OK to trust this site ignore the big angry warning.
Best part is other similar internal sites don;t use SSL and all have big messages about someone stealing your soul if you go there and these are commercial systems that run all the HVAC for all the campuses across Canada.
I need more Tylenol.
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