CSS !important

always annoyed me cz I read it not important where it actually means the opposite... Damn it devs get your shit together!

I just pulled an all-nighter to write an usability testing protocol in Microsoft Word for a medical mobile app.

- statement of consent and privacy declaration; easy: 1 hour
- structuring the protocol and writing the different use cases; easy: 1-2 hours
- layouting the document so the tables don't look like utter shit and adding dotted lines into the columns so the user can write in it without fucking up the whole document when resizing a simple column width; a fucking nightmare: 5 hours

Why is the creation of a nice layout so inefficient to the point where I'd rather design a form in CSS and send it to my printer, get your shit together!

I don't think I've seen this nexus model before... Good job Google!

"learning" html and css

So, there are these courses in my school, "ÜK" ("Überbetriebliche Kurse") we call them.
It's 5 days, a Tuesday to Thursday, next week Tuesday and Wednesday, last day in the afternoon we have a test.

Today is that Wednesday

I know html and css pretty well, so if was pretty easy, I didn't even bother to do some of the tasks we had
I did look through the book over the weekend to make sure I knew my stuff right

Now, the theoretical part of the test had stuff like "colspan" witch was nowhere to be seen in the book and PowerPoints, and some stuff was just unclear as fuck, seriously...

*looks up colspan*

Apparently it's a table cell that spans two columns, or more, if you want to

I never needed something like that, and we never looked at it, that's why I didn't know about it.

There where other unclear questions as well, so I went to the teacher after the test and told him.

He gave me an empty test where I made an X for stuff that wasn't in the book or the PowerPoints and wrote a bit for the stuff that was unclear.

I did know some more then some in the class, so I generally xed the stuff that we didn't learn
The teacher will correct it accordingly, and cut out the questions that we couldn't have known.
So that's at least something
For the next class, he's going to have some "theoretical learning" or whatever he called it

I mean, in the end it's fair, but it annoys me that these courses aren't as well thought out as they should be...

So after this course I can say:
I DIDN'T LEARN A FUCKING THING

Btw, the second part was changing a website up the way its telling you to, that was easier the the theoretical part, witch was ticking the right fucking box...

The datepicker saga

Part one

So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page

Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.

Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.

Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.

CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...

... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.

Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.

Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work

Fucking...

... Bailing on that.

Part 2

Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.

At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.

For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:

[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...

But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.

So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.

Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.

But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.

Part 3

Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great

Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!

Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.