Dear dfox,

Thank you for not making your app completely change layouts and screw up scrolling whenever we turn on our sides when reading rants in bed, unlike nearly every mobile web browser out there. We all really appreciate it.

--Random devRanter

I actually clicked past this, as per habit, before I reacted. Best EULA I've ever seen!

(In case anyone doesn't know: "Lorem ipsum" is a nonsense place holder text mostly used to try out layouts.)

Second semester

Java - OOP Course

We had to write a game, an arkanoid clone

Neat shit

And a fun course, mad respect to the Prof.

BUT

Most students, including me had this ONE bug where the ball would randomly go out of the wall boundaries for no clear reason.

A month passed, sleepless nights, no traces.

Two months later. Same shit. Grades going down (HW grades) because it became more and more common, yet impossible to track down.

3 months later, we had to submit the HW for the last time which included features like custom level sets, custom blocks and custom layouts.

So before we submit the game for review, they had pre-defined level sets that we had to include for testing sake.

I loaded that.

The bug is back.

But

REPRODUCIBLE.

OMG.

So I started setting up breakpoints.

And guess what the issue was.

FLOATING FUCKING POINT NUMBERS

(Basically the calculations were not as expected)

Changing to Ints did it's job and the bug was officially terminated.

Most satisfying night yet.

Always check your float number calculations as it's never always what you expect.

Lesson learned, use Ints whenever possible.

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Talking about layouts.....New ConstraintLayout.....oh wait.....

So this guy is supposed to do the frontend.
I do the backend.
I offer an endpoint.
He does his HTML+CSS magic.
Me: Cool but data is hardcoded. Could you get the data from the endpoint I sent you?
Him: "I'd prefer you do that, I can make a git repo so you download the front."

... So you don't do frontend, you just write pretty layouts. And I have to actually write the frontend logic? Go f yourself.

!rant

It's been months since I last posted in here, but I finally get to share good news for once!

I quit my current job and took an offer at a much better company in a senior developer role.

I no longer have to put up with an idiot tech lead who cannot either prioritize tasks or follow simple processes, a self-absorbed senior developer who keeps deleting my code for his because he prefers tables over divs for layouts, and an incompetent HR manager who is more concerned about his image than the welfare of us employees.

I felt pure bliss when I handed in my resignation. I feel focused and ready to tackle my next challenges at my new job in January. I can't wait.

My personal learning here is that while good things come to those who wait, it still needs you to take that first step yourself and without hesitation.

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

My first real "rant", okay...

So I decided today to hop back on the horse and open Android Studio for the first time in a couple months.

I decided I was going to make a random color generator. One of my favorite projects. Very excited.

Got all the layouts set up, and got a new color every tap with RGB and hex codes, too. Took more time to open Android Studio, really.

Excited with my speedy progress, I think "This'll be done in no time!". Text a friend and tell them what I'm up to. Shes very nice, wants the app. "As soon as I'm done". I expected that to be within the hour.

I want to be able to save the colors for future reference. Got the longClickListener set up just fine. Cute little toast pops up every time. Now I just need to save the color to a file.

Easy, just a semicolon-deliminated text file in my app's cache folder.

Three hours later, and my file still won't write any data. Friend has gone to sleep. Homework has gone undone. My hatred for Android is reborn.

Stay tuned, the adventure continues tomorrow...

Porting of a huge web application from ZF1 to Laravel 5.5.

In summary:
1. approx. 200,000 lines of spaghetti code (ZF1)
2. approx. 2500 custom Javascript files
3. approx. 600 CSS files
4. hundreds of node modules and libraries
5. 12 different layouts (Home, Member, Admin,...)
6. ...
7. ...
8. ...
...

I've got six days to get this done. God help me.

(I am an entry-inter-intermediate level dev)
P = Person

P:Hey Can you build me a POS system for free?

Me: Yea whatever. (because... immediate family member)

P:Ok Great.

Me: *starts working on it.. almost done with inventory control and layouts in one night*

P: When will it be done? and I need it in a full screen window not a browser!!

Me: Soon..and I have not worked in ASP yet. So it will be a full screen browser app.

P: Aww you cant do it fast? You are not skilled enough??? Poor you, you are not good enough. I can do it in a few hours. Just write a C program which stores entries in a txt file. I dont want sql shes-que-el on my system. You dont want to use .txt because it will be harder for you. Poor you.. no skill.

Me: *raging to a level where i turn into kryptonium and burn superman to death but still keeping my calm* You will get it when you get it. Period

Inner Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF. IM DOING THIS FOR FREE SO THAT IT HELPS YOU OUT. NAGGING ME WONT HELP YOUR CAUSE ONE BIT. GO FUCKING LEARN HOW TO CODE YOURSELF AND MAKE IT YOURSELF OR BUY IT FOR A FUCK TON OF UNJUSTIFIED MONEY. IM GIVING YOU A BEAUTIFUL LAYOUT, GREAT APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE USING LARAVEL AND GREAT DATABASE DESIGN WHICH WOULD BE SCALABLE AND PRODUCE MEANINGFUL REPORTS. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PREFER A .TXT FILE OVER A WELL DESIGNED DATABASE. WOULD YOU FUCKING OPEN THAT HAMSTER CAGE OF A BRAIN OF YOURS WITH A KNIFE OR A SCREWDRIVER?
IF ITS THAT EASY FOR YOU GO FUCKING DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP BOTHERING ME. I AM TAKING MY TIME OUT FROM FREELANCING TO HELP YOU OUT. I COULD BE SPENDING THIS TIME ON OTHER PROJECTS WHICH WOULD GET ME SOMEWHERE. THE ONLY FUCKING REASON IM DOING IT BECAUSE I MIGHT BE ABLE TO RESELL THE POS (PIECE OF SHIT) TO OTHER PEOPLE IN FUTURE AND MAKE MY SHARE OF UNJUSTIFIED SHIT TON OF MONEY.

iOS 11 you buggy piece of shit!

Layouts breaking all around, can’t figure out if it’s in landscape or portrait mode, lock menu disapearing, minimizing apps breaks them...

Oooh, you invented a GENIUS NEW option to turn mobile data on from launch control, but WiFi and Bluetooth buttons don’t turn these off, but disconnect from current network... WHOSE SMART ASS IDEA WAS THAT? BURN IN UX HELL ASSHOLE!

Haven’t seen a worse update since Vista...

Currently, I am going through a legacy application built in microsoft access back in 90s.

* No Comments
* No Relationships between tables
* Random code that does nothing
* Weird form layouts
* Weird naming conventions

I need to copy this functionality into modern version using SQL Server Management studio and asp.net core, I also need to kill myself because none of this fucking shit fucking fuck makes sense.

I do my best to write clean and concise code along with comments but after this ordeal I am going to up my game because nobody should need to suffer through spaghetti code and stupid logic that is uncommented.

😶

This really pisses me off. As a front end developer (ember.js, HTML and Css) colleagues and boss and pm are always making jokes how I just need to change a button or a color and whenever there is a bug in the UI there's always big fun and jokes around it. But when there's a bug in the API, they never joke around, it's just : oh yeah we're getting the wrong data or an exception. But they always like to undervalue UI work even when it involves complex layouts, multi browser compatibility, responsive design, mobile browsers etc.. While they just code their API to connect to a database and everything works they don't really need to worry about what the user is using as a browser. They just get requests and send replies. I don't really think people value the work in front end as much as backend and that pisses me off as I believe there's a lot more going on in the front end.. I know they mean well and they are all cool people but sometimes it pisses me off as they don't value my work..

My new team more or less forced me to change from a Windows machine to a Mac (Mac book pro, I think?) due to "compatibility issues", so I thought I might as well see what all the Mac fuzz is about. Here is a list of my observations so far:
- If you try powering on the mac book with more than one DisplayPort cable plugged in, the screen will go black until you plug all DP cables out

- If you unplug your DisplayPort cables to go to a meeting you can expect one of the monitors getting frozen on the blurry login screen (without any login prompt) when you get back (while the main monitor shows your desktop without the taskbar)

- If you get out of range from your wireless peripherals (keyboard in this case) while going to a meeting your keyboard layouts are most likely deleted and reset to U.S qwerty when you get back to your desk

- When pressing quit on any application you can't expect in to close and clear up memory, it will remain in the background until you force kill it.

- There is a 50/50 chance that your Mac book never wakes up from sleep

Best thing is that I found out today that the software we use is completely compatible with any RedHat/Solaris distro.

Rant over.

I see too many back-end rants against front-ends.

Should we talk about table layouts, malformed html, programatically generated spaghetti wrong markup, css absurd class naming, infinite div wrapping (div-itis), awful usability, poor legibility, terrible typography, wrong color palettes and user-unfriedly design? To name a few horrors i've seen so far.

Some people won't admit that their contempt against HTML and CSS being 'not real code' actually hides their inability or unwillingness to learn it. Or they need the feeling of superiority.

After EVERY. FUCKING. RESTART... I have to delete one of my keyboard layouts and re-add it so Im able to switch between them. Its been a YEAR now! But hey! Notepad has tabs now! M$...Bunch of glue sniffing monkeys...

ALMOST HALF AN HOUR SPENT TRYING TO LOG INTO MY FUCKING RASPBERRY PI OVER SSH.

you know what the problem is?

I’m not gonna tell you because I want you to feel the agony too.

> be me
> want to set up a nextcloud instance on pi to play with
> boot up
> ssh pi
*enter password*
*password incorrect*
^tries like 60 more times with different things
> pulls HDMI out of PC
> connect to pi direct
*please login*
*enter password*
Hackerman_voice_im_in.mp3
Wtf.xml
> check the logs
>try login from phone
Fuckyou.jpg
>Tries resetting password
Fuckyou-final.jpg
>tried logging into other pi
Fuckyou-final2.jpg
>*wtf’s harder*
Andthenithitme.png
>type @ sign
Pi: “
> OHHHHHHH

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

In my first android app I used multiple hidden layouts instead of creating new activities... 🙈

* { border: 1px solid #f00; }

This is how I debug my webpage layouts xD Anybody else?

Time to add a new feature in an Android app:-
Java code with basic layout to implement the feature - 1 hour
Polishing the layout - 30 mins
Time to fucking make the scroll view wrap around the text and not overflow in the dialog so that the buttons below are visible - 6-10 hours!!!

This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.

So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)

So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!

There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?

Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?

I know most people will be unable to relate here, but FUCK THE FRENCH PC KEYBOARD LAYOUT

FUCK YOUR STUPID ASS ALT-GR (right alt that acts as modifier while the other alt is used for shortcuts, but can't be combined with ctrl because that would make an alt-gr) THAT GIVES YOU ACCESS TO | ON THE F*IN 6 KEY AND \ ON THE F*IN 8. FUCK YOUR USELESS ASS ² KEY, THAT ONLY WORKS AS A ². NOBODY EVER USED THAT KEY FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN COMPLAINING THAT "you know, I really hate the ² key, it's absolutely useless"

THE MAC LAYOUT IS 100 TIMES BETTER, WITH MORE GLYPHS ACCESSIBLE WITHOUT THAT RETARDED "special characters" MENU. WHOEVER DESIGNED A KEYBOARD THAT REQUIRES PEOPLE TO USE THAT MENU EVER IS THE ONE I'D CALL SPECIAL. NEVER HAVE PEOPLE REFRAINED FROM BUYING A MAC BECAUSE OF THAT LAYOUT, SO START USING THAT LAYOUT INSTEAD OF THAT RETARDED, ANTI-DEV PC LAYOUT...

Here's the French PC keyboard layout, notice how every useful key for devs have been placed to maximize annoyance, minimize typing efficient and accelerate ergonomically related diseases

This fucking teacher was my "Web Design" teacher in high school.

Okay, yes, I acknowledge that this is an entry level course, but does that honestly mean that we need to teach the same source taught to students in the 90s? You know, the one where all layouts are table/iframe-based?

I understand that I completely disregarded your set criteria for grading by using CSS to create my website rather than tables and I frames, however I believe that it's fairly logical to conclude that anyone using CSS has a sufficient comprehension of HTML to be able to pass your stupid assignments. So why must time be wasted with coding poorly designed sites?

New web devs don't know the struggle of using spacer.gif, nested table layouts, and vibrant "web friendly" colors out of requirement.

Ahhhhhh anyone here use yED? I don't know how i even worked out diagrams before this. For the past couple years this has been my choice diagramming tool <3

Top image is before, bottom is after a single click. I just join boxes and let it work it out at the end. Then obviously do some adjustments to read how I like but seriously makes it easier to trial various layouts. I even make stuff in yED before recreating in something like Visio, if need be.

If anyone got another diagramming tool they like to use, post below (trying to add new stuff to my toolbox lol)

EDIT: Ahh, tried but you can't see the lines after the image gets compressed after upload (and DarkReader on chrome isn't exactly helping :p).

Oh boy do I sure love designing site layouts for mobile! The limited screen space makes me think about what's absolutely necessary to have on screen at any given time, and I need to account for both portrait and landscape. I love a good challenge - aaaand done! Time to check it out.

Ah, fuck, the browser has completely disregarded the text sizes I specified and headers of any size take up the entire screen space.

Ah, fuck, the browser has decided that 4 pixels of padding should be 32.

Ah, fuck, the browser has made the executive decision that images should be whatever size it's in the mood to display today.

Ah, fuck, all this enormous text has also wrapped itself to one letter per line.

Just a wild thought here: maybe mobile browsers should actually respect CSS rules.

Me: Hey, can you help me with that?
Coworker: Sure
* Looks at code *
Ah, you just have to...
* Tries to type *
Uhm, do you the vim plugin?
Me: yeah, is that a problem?
Coworker: Weird flex but it's ok
* tries to type solution *
Uhm, do you also use another keyboard layout?
Me: Yes, I use the US layout (instead of the german layout)
Coworker: I'm done with this, you type
Me: 🤣🤣🤣

I want to share this story and need your advise.

When I was teaching exisiting team members about git and new iOS development ecosystem. I was changing the whole ios development practices and processes that time. One of my teammates wasn’t listening, when implementing the new ios development practices and standards, he actually screwed all of the projects.

He’s been with us for 2 years and he even don’t know how to use git. He forcefully push his changes without pulling our changes first. I was so angry that I reported him to my manager to address this matter. And then my manager told me, he is aware of my teammate’s incapabilities. He said he was planning to terminate him, and he is been thinking about it for 3 months.

When the judgement day came, we were in the meeting room. My manager told us the bad news that one of us will be terminated. During the meeting he said, “I am sorry, {my teammate’s name}. You will be out of the team due to {reason of termination}. {my name} reported to me that you dont meet the deadline, you are always late with 2 weekly sprint to your tickets”. As my manager keeps talking, my teammate look at me with his eyes so angry together with his girlfriend (her girlfriend is part of mobile team, but she is focused on UI/UX).

After my manager stops talking, her girlfriend started crying and said I was the one who should be terminated. Her reason was that I keep on giving difficult tasks to his boyfriend, that’s why he is always late to report. In my defense, those tasks are not difficult, most of his tasks is just changing the color of labels, changing layouts. If you are an iOS developer you know how easy it is to change font colors, changing the layouts using storyboards. Her girlfriend keeps on rambling that I should be the one needs to be terminated.

After few days, he left the team and surprisingly his girlfriend stayed and we never talk to each other except anything about work.

I am really pissed guys. Now my teammates think I am the bad guy asking my manager to terminate anyone in the team if I feel to. I feel very very not good in my work now. I can’t function what I used to. The termination of my teammate was already planned why am I should take the blame?

Do you guys think that in terms of a design, we're in a refresh loop?

Like, I don't think the goal of a design is to be user friendly and optimal for all human eyes. There's a million ways sideways to achieve that.

I think the real thing most designers go for is to just make something look "new". And every few years that needs to be redone. Forever. In an infinite loop.

Fuck actual usability, thought-out layouts, contrast rules, what-the-fuck ever. 99% of the goal is to make it look "modern"

I’m working at an architecture firm these days, so I don’t have many “dev” stories to tell. However, I’d like to share this anecdote to reassure (or demoralize) you all that the kind of nonsense we’ve all dealt with as software developers isn’t limited to the software industry.

I’ve been working on a project to build townhomes and apartments on vacant lots in an urban environment.
Space is limited, so the client assured us early on that they would be centralizing all the mechanical equipment (water heaters, air conditioners, etc.) in the basement of each building. We finally got all the apartments laid out and presented them to the client last week. During that meeting, we get a casual “oh, by the way, we need a 3-foot by 3-foot mechanical closet in each apartment.” Did the project manager push back? Of course not. Have our deadlines been adjusted as a result of changing requirements? Don’t be silly! Starting tomorrow morning, the team gets to feverishly search for an extra 9 square feet in each of a couple dozen different apartment layouts that are already “cozy” in time to meet our next deliverable.

Clients suck.
Changing requirements suck.
Pushover PMs suck.
In every industry.

Xcode storyboard sucks!. At least it could've had a code version of the storyboards (like android XML layouts) so that at least you could properly copy paste a layout from somewhere. Autolayouts and constraints are so flipping confusing that I almost always end up doing all the layouts in the code itself.

A few months ago I ranted about how my first encounter with Assembly was hopefully the last one

Here I am, again, with my second Assembly encounter. However, this time I'm able to read and understand it more, such that I'm even able to compute stack layouts. I don't even hate it that much anymore.

I guess I'm walking the path I couldn't defeat

*cries in %rax*

How I knew this was for me.... I didn't.
It kind of just happened in the natural order of things.

I was once a wii young lad who had a dream, and that dream became a smashing pile of being broke, jobless and unemployable, not a great way to start off that early life but hey, it was what it was.

So I looked at my computer one day, lousy dusty Pentium 4 with a massive 80GB HDD, in the corner, and went... fuck it, this thing is going to make me money.

So from there I picked up my old high school book on VB6 and on with it I went, forcing my self to make that calculator I couldn't do in school and a few other things, from there I got into a course for webDev, not uni, and after being dropped from that course ... that's a story for another time, I basically said fuck the system and my journey into webDev took on a life of its own.

Starting with frontend (back when layouts where tables and css was font colours) and IE5 was still a thing, and progressing into JS for a fucktonne of "onClick" events, then backend... I went down the .PHP3, PHP4 hadn't been released yet, but at the time .ASP was a thing too although it was complicated as fuck.

For many years it was just 1 thing after another, picking up MySQL, screwing around with databases, setting up linux servers, gobbling up Python a couple years later and started automating different things, just building site after site, until one day I landed a professional gig - not just casual freelance stuff, and from there when you think you know a lot, what I thought I knew got blown out the window and imposter syndrome sunk in, but I kept pushing ahead.

That saying "you don't know what you don't know", it has meaning here, you don't know what you don't know... but the moment you know you don't know enough, you either crumble or you keep waterboarding yourself in knowledge to reduce the unknown.

And somewhere along the line I accepted this path.
It may have taken me a few years to get off my feet but I'm glad I took that first step.

<rant>
Android layouts
<endRant/>

That feel when the html parser you are stuck with randomly strips out css and js so you have to reinvent grid layouts with tables.

Asking Android Studio to convert your layouts to ConstraintLayout is the equivalent of asking a two legged horse to do your laundry.

Late night ramble warning.

I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.

I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?

Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.

Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.

While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.

Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.

Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.

Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.

I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.

GOD ALMIGHTY I HATE SWIFT & XCODE...

Why the fuck does it take a horrendous amount of time to muck about with layout constraints. Why the heck does xcode choose to add constraint layouts to elements that already have pissing constraints! Why does dealing with something as trivial as tables have to be so god damn fucking involved when HTML and CSS let me create and style tables in fuck all lines.

And what the hell is up with how pissing long xcode takes just to figure out that 1 extra line of code I've just added. You jump to another file and xcode finally decides to be an ide again and bitch at the fact that you've forgotten to add some parameter or that they've decided to rename paramter "x" since version fuck nows what.

Working with abstract classes is fun, lets use protocols (because interfaces are too old school) and then lets tack on something we call extensions and then lets make people piss about with convenience initializers.

And lord almighty, what the fuck is up with casting, what all this ?! BS. What's wrong with just checking if the value is null in the first place, or whats wrong with giving something an initial value, oh because having to unwrap shit is more elegant right??

And good god, I need to own a fucking cinema screen just to have the storyboard open, there's less fucking panels on the Sistine Chapel ceiling
then there is in xcode.

I like my work, don't get me wrong, but any time I need to work with this fucking 12 years old project that has so many conflicting branches, css that remembers float layouts, half of the files not being tracked, ruby dependencies that are a decade outdated I just want to quit.

Tried flutter for the first time in life, for 2 days, java based Android dev here.
I have some.... thoughts...

Flutter does not feel extremely new to me. It is very much relatable if you have ever tried basic the spring/ other java based gui framework. It is trying to achieve the goods from multiple worlds,its so far good, but mann its playing on thin ice.

Flutter : Yo boy embrace me. I am the beauty. checkout my hot reload.
Me :❤️❤️😍 (But wait. your first execution is wayy longer than a simple android studio build. And AS would generally take smaller time after every rebuild. And you are going to take the same long time as first build, if app gets closed or my usb gets accidentally removed. So I see what you did there ;))

Flutter: Ha. Checkout my function passing as parameter. ever thought your puny java going to give you that?
Me :you got me ,❤️. (Although this style is not so uncommon with web devs)

Flutter: everything is a widget, everything is stateful or stateless, Single Streams FTW!
me: ❤️

Flutter:You kotlin devs are gonna love me, i got Small, concise code
Me: Now wait, This is a thin ice for me, okay? I hated when kotlin replaced everything with symbols & lamdas for a confusing but small code, So be careful,even though your code is still good.

Flutter : Control every pixel , dear! No more xmls!
Me : Yes, what is with that? are we accidentally going in the past?
Java desktop apps, spring framework used to build whole layouts with programming language. The day i stepped into Android, it was xml for ui and java/kotlin for code. was that a bad decision or is this one?
Anyways i liked my stuff seperated, but that's just me.

Flutter : Ugh so much whining. Are you going to work with me or not?
Me : Yes mam! ❤️

Finally I was able to look into css grids in more detail and gotta say it's impressive, also "grid-template-areas" made me chuckle for a bit, at how unusual and easy you can define layouts (even compatible with media queries!), which are also heavily obvious and readable, reminds me of the old games where characters were just symbols.

Designer made the layouts reading only half the requirements. We have stuff such as "3 email inputs" where he just stuck one and told us to eyeball it if we needed something else.

Plot Twist: everyobody sucks designing stuff on the dev team, so after explaining that we needed more input from him, he sent us the psds and told us to change them as we saw fit.

I didn't posted something in a long time so...

TL;DR: FUCK YOU ANDROID STUDIO YOU FUCKING SHIT PIECE OF SOFTWARE

Thank you for your time.

I am running my own meme social network. For quite some time I wished I knew a Android developer, which could help me.

Because I know java I tried it myself, and Android studio is one of the worst programms I've ever seen.

My app crashed the whole time, just because my studio version was 1 behind. Updated studio, everything worked.

My layout wasn't showing correctly, reopened Studio, all layouts deleted.

For no good reason video views aren't resizing, so I need to use exoplayer.

One video on my platform nearly crashes the app when creating a thumbnail.

And so one....

I fucking hate Android studio...

(PS: if your a German, Swiss, Austrian you could check out my network and may become a beta tester of the app)

Oh God, I just realized I suck at coming up with ideas for layouts.

I have been staring at my abomination in Android studio for, I don't know how many, hours. :/

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

Oh, gather 'round fellow wizards of the code realm! 🧙✨ Let me regale you with the epic tale of software sorcery and the comical misadventures that come with it! 🤪🎉

So there we are, facing the dreaded Internet Explorer dragon 🐉 - an ancient, stubborn beast from the era of dial-up connections and clipart-laden websites. It breathes fire on our carefully crafted layouts, turning them into a pixelated disaster! 🔥😱

And then, the grand quest of cross-browser testing begins! 🚀🌍 One moment, your website is a shining knight in Chrome's armor, and the next, it's a jester in Safari's court. A circus of compatibility struggles! 🎪🤹

CSS, the arcane art of cascading style sheets, is our magic wand. But oh, the incantations can be treacherous! A slight misstep and your buttons start disco dancing, and your text transforms into a microscopic mystery! 🕺👀

But fear not, brave developers! We wield the enchanted sword of Stack Overflow and the shield of Git version control. We shall slay bugs and refactor with valor! ⚔️🐞

In this enchanted land, documentation is the mystical parchment, often written in the cryptic dialect of ancient monks. "This function doeth stuff, thou knoweth what I meaneth." 📜😅

And meetings, oh the meetings! 🗣️🤯 It's like a conference of babbling brooks in the forest of Jargon. "Let us discuss the velocity of the backlog!" 🌿🐇

But amidst the chaos, we code on! Armed with our emojis and a bubbling cauldron of coffee, we persist. For we are the wizards and witches of the digital age, conjuring spells in Python and brewing potions in Java. 🐍☕

Onward, magical beings of code! 🚀 May your bugs be few, and your merges conflict-free! 🙌🎩

Constraint Layout is the best thing Google has ever made for responsive Android design, when it works.

Half the time it suddenly stops finding any elements I want to attach my selected one to, so it can't constrain what I want it to constrain.

A restart fixes it though...

FUCK YOU GOOGLE

I feel I have zero control as a developer.. You made the shittiest choice by bringing in intellij , you made an even worse choice by adding gradle.. You add thousands of configuration options to manifests, layouts but provide no common place to find documentation for them.. This is just nonsense.. I've wasted endless hours figuring out your dex limits, proguard rules.. It's just frustrating.. Could you be anymore counterintuitive with your unit testing framework! Honestly it's a steaming pile of shit..

When you work on a web design by a graphic designer, expect to see 12px used for article paragraphs and 9px for navs... And of course, decimal pixels and asymmetric layouts that don't fit in any grid systems... On top of that, layers and layers and clipping masks and all the weird stuff in Illustrator...

TIL that our creative design team that produces our web designs/layouts are all print designers. They were stumped when I gave them a wireframe mock up as the base for a website design for the first time, with no defined pixel measurements.

10 years ago my bosses came to me: Make a few adjustments to the logic of this website. Should be a quick thing they said. Got a zip file later. Hundreds of php files. Inside, thousands of lines of the best PHP/HTML Spaghetti I've ever seen. No CSS though, but lots of nested table layouts. The best part: everything was in french, content, comments, varnames. The original dev didn't use includes for the most repetitive stuff, even db credentials were copied in every file. Took me a week.

Two weeks later: Change that and that please....

We decided to write everything from scratch then.

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.

i hate ios storyboard
its a disaster
its not Version controllable, also its not as good as android xml layouts where you can just copy paste someone else xml to get a view exactly like his
right now I have to clone a git repo, to open it in xcode, just to see how the guy has set up one of his textFields so that I can create a textfield like his

Why do germans have to use STRG?
ITS CONFUSING!
Im Swiss german and people often say to me use STRG!
Only that im speaking german isn't a real Argument! Why are we even using different keyboard-layouts?
Why arent we all using CTRL?
Its pretty mich the Standard for all keyboards!
And what confused me the most when er got Windows 7 machines at primary school!
I didn't know what fucking button to press until the IT Guy of our school came and explained US all that STRG was CTRL!
And the most worst of all, when german youtubers say Press CTRL in a Video but show STRG!

“Huddles don't work in safari 🤡,” Slack said.
Develop → User Agent → Google Chrome.
Boom, huddles suddenly work in Safari, and my today's huddle went absolutely fine.

Yep, I switched to Safari as my default browser. Previously, I didn't use it solely because YouTube's full-screen mode acted weird, but now I quit watching YouTube altogether.

Safari is a stellar browser. First, it wipes the floor with everything, even including Thorium, in the performance department (on Apple Silicon at least). Second, it's really beautiful with its new inline tab panel, where you have just one line of icons on top, instead of having two (tabs and url bar). DevTools are amazing. It can also connect to my iPhone's Safari via Wi-Fi and inspect the opened page — a must-have for heavy layouts. Plus, if my website works fine in Safari, it sure as hell will work fine everywhere. Safari is a great hack detector, as it won't tolerate dirty hacks. Works wonders for your code discipline.

The person responsible for making layouts in CSS/HTML got moved from our project and now our team had been forced to improvise by ourselves until a replacement is found.

Suddenly all those old, untouched bugs seem very appealing.

not actually a coworker, but I had to take the place of this guy who made the whole websites layouts in tables. in 2012

Fuck accessibility.

No WAIT, before you call me an asshole hear me out.

So when you use CSS grid to create layouts you're supposed to not use the features it has (reordering items) too much, and instead keep the HTML structured the way it's supposed to be read.
When you add a picture of a cat you're supposed to put a alt="Brown cat sitting on a chair" there.
Also you should test for all kinds of sight disabilities and use high contrast colors.

All that for likely <1% of your users.

What would be the alternative? HTML is a markup language, and not supposed to be directly read by humans. Invest the time ONCE for screenreaders to understand CSS positioning and read content in a sensible order. Use image recognition to describe pictures (with selectable levels of detail). Let the browser modify colors on the fly for better readability.

Don't spend time and money to solve a problem 100000 Times that could be solved once.

Fuck accessibility.

If you have two keyboard layouts installed, English and Russian, and you’re trying to type “dev” but end up typing in Russian layout, it comes out as “вум”, literally “fem”.

All developers are secretly female even if they don’t know it yet

Illuminati confirmed heartbleed can’t melt ARM cores

It's clearly in the contract people.
You walk a client through the entire contract and come launch they want to add pages and change layouts without paying extra because they have 24 hours to launch.
What don't you get about "you approved the site map, layouts, and designs which is what we quoted you for, contract clearly states how much per extra pages and how much to change layouts and designs after approval and work processed"

I'm enraged by seeing my floated images collapsing into one line on large screen because there are fewer lines displayed. What tricks do you use to circumvent that? Maybe there are grid-layouts for blogposts?

Keyboard layouts/localization seem like something went horribly wrong and nobody decided to clean up the mess.

And now we have multiple layouts where the fucking alt key doesn't even work exactly the same between them, how is that even possible? And who thought it was a good idea to differentiate between left and right alt, shift and control keys, leading to subtle issues nobody asked for?

In Vim I made a keyboard shortcut with alt and on the British layout it only works with the left alt key, on the US layout on both. Wat.

HELP, ITS A MESS!!

Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .

But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.

I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...

THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)

2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.

3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:

"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "

I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).

WHAT SHOULD I DO???

Week 1 Day 5 - Week 2 Day 5

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop" - Confucius

He had a lot of great quotes but I think that's one every dev who's ever worked on a personal project can get behind. It's been about a week since my last rant so I've got a lot to cover, I got a little busy so my progress has been lacking but I have two days off coming up and I plan on making all my meals ahead of time and turning my phone off to limit distractions.

So far I've worked my way through the first lesion on layouts and getting/editing views by the id. This seems pretty basic once you get comfortable with the topic. I'd like to think this will become second nature once I start to get into the guts of the course. The second lesson started working with internet connectivity and I've just started working through it. A lot doesn't make sense but at the start of the lesson one nothing made sense so I assume it'll all wrap up nicely.

I wanted to publish this two days ago (January 23) but I closed my laptop and forgot all about the rant so now it's two days later and I've made some progress, things are getting easier to understand and I'm liking it. I've also decided to start making something I've always wanted to while I work on android development. I'm going to start making an RPG I've been working on since my sophomore year of high school. I haven't written any code for my game yet but I've got the world development and story air tight. So as an ending statement, I'd like to ask anyone on devRant with game making experience how I should go about structuring my project, and some of the things that aren't going to be easy to find with google searches. I plan on, to the dismay of many other game dev's I've talked to, write it in Java because it's familiar to me and I would probably make a worse game in C++ even though that is the go to language. I'd also like to thank some of you repeat readers for silently encouraging me to keep going just by ++ing my rants every time, JoshBent and Dfox. It's been really nice seeing names pop up every single time.

Why do people get an idea that Ctrl+Alt+[character] is a good combination for keyboard shortcuts? Just because your keyboard layout doesn't have a special character for Ctrl+Alt+Z, it doesn't mean other people don't! Did you ever stop to think that more than half buttons on your keyboard already have a Ctrl+Alt (~AltGr) binding, so maybe, just fucking maybe, other keyboard layouts could have that kind of bindings for other buttons as well? You've got 38 published works, you boast your years of experience, yet you can't fucking consider some basic real-world problems when working on a piece of software!

God I fucking hate people like these, with their PhDs and no actual hands-on experience, they're always so smug about their work and expect you to pay them millions, but fail to understand that details like those are why people pick you instead of some cheap student, and that's where their salary comes from.

I've had enough. I can't handle those bad designs layouts anymore. It is getting on my nerves to receive designs from "professionals" that don't think about responsive layouts, correct alignments, grid, vector shapes, use 6 different font families, and have graphics placed in the most wrong places.

Oh, and let's not forget that such design should be coded in 15h. Sure dear client. Keep dreaming, idiot.

working on a big app, developing front and backend while being focussed on design.

when you have more than 20 different layouts and you're forced to use license free stuff, life's getting harder every day.

why is material design so nice ;(

Is this a technological metaphor?

For some Hacker challenge I was reading up on different keyboard layouts, Dvorak and stuff. And the technological lock in is baffling me: The rationale for qwerty was to reduce jamming of the typewriter letter arms. Today that doesn't make sense anymore, yet we stick to it. Wondering how much of today's tech is dragged down by things like that.

This stuff often also makes me weary of the first decisions, like choosing a protocol or data base - its kind and layout, because we might be stuck with it for reasons of backwards compatibility.... Like when Microsoft opted for the backslash as a directory separator..

I wasn’t paid for this, this was part of a school project I had to do about 2 years ago when I was in 9th grade.

We had to do something in biology and me and my friend both decided we should make an informational app that shows info about different kinds of birds. It was an Android app, it was before I moved to iOS development.

We knew absolutely nothing about advanced layout development and constraints and layouts or anything, and we barely knew how to navigate the Android UI framework.

We had like 5 days to work on this shit. We wanted it to look nice and somehow we came up with a layout that doesn’t look all fucked up between form factors and we barely had to code anything in Java, it was all just layouts and shit. But we knew absolutely NOTHING.

We totally failed. The project stunk so much I don’t have a backup of it anywhere and I am glad that is so.

Looking back at this shit ass project, I can see how much I learned in the process in terms of app development and my general knowledge and skills in computer science, 99% of it by teaching myself.

Why the industry jumped on photoshop as a web design and layout tool is beyond me. It's like trying to stir coffee with your thumb. I'm a descent photoshop user but have always used inDesign in web mode. Far quicker for chucking around layouts and options (as page). It also exports as rgb png's either full pages or selections with or without transparency (at any resolution). Which are perfect for then optimising in Photoshop (Pixelmator these days) or any other less costly image editor. I hand code my sites then in Coda, love it.

I got many reasons to hate my old Dell Studio-1557, but if there is one thing I love about it, it is its keyboard. I don't have much technical keyboard knowledge, but it's just comfortable for me. Wide keys and short keystrokes, no gaps between them (keys are actually sloped on the edge and fit together) and most importantly, no num pad.
So now that i feel it needs to be retired after 9 yrs of loyalty, i can't find a successor for it that have my old Studio's keyboard-feel. Most of laptops in the market have small keys with orthogonal edges and lots of space wasted as gaps between them (like new Dells), a useless (for me) num pad and worst of all, small miniature arrow keys (like thinkPad) and other navigations seems to be new designers fashion.

I'd be glad if some one introduce me a laptop with a similar keyboard to mine (in the picture)
Or what do you propose, should i care about the keyboard at all? are these new designs easy to take up with? wouldn't i suffer a keyboardalgia?

edit: no macs btw :)

Just finished the prototype of my HTML5/Canvas implementation of a visual novel engine. The actual script exists behind the scenes on a REST like web service (to act as a sort of drm). The assets for the game and UI layouts are stored in what I call a shit file. Their is s a utility called the shitpacker that creates a shit file from a directory structure. The name of my engine is the Pyst engine. Pyst stands for Python Stub...as the game script is actually a subset of Python that I created. Eventually I will probably move Pyst to JS so I could hypothetically support offline games.

Just came another iOS app that is an exact replica of its android counterpart! Icons are pixelated...layouts are pathetic..when will people realise that jus replicating apps across iOS and android is the worst thing ever???

My main problem with programming on android phones(not for android) is it's keyboard, almost none of default layouts don't have the needed buttons(i.e. ; [ ] ( ) ...), I managed to find a good one "Hacker's Keyboard", 5 rows almost every button(even shift, ctrl and arrow keys). But here's the problem with this: it's buttons width is very low on portrait mode, on landscape, even if you're used to lanscape typing, you won't be able to see shit because it's covering most of screen.
"Hey, what about an external keyboard", well it's not totally a bad idea, but you would need a stand for your phone, and if it's connecting via usb and not bt, you have to buy a usb2[yourPort] convertion, besides I want to hold my phone while typing "How about you make you make your own bt/usb attachable mini keyboard for your phone.", Wow that's a very good idea, it would take maybe a year to make it, but maybe instead of making the whole thing myself I can buy a mini keyboard and make the attaching part myself, it can't be THAT hard, right? Need a 3D printer(√), need time(have alot of it), need to design it(no problem), now start... uhhh nevermind, who am I kiddin', I won't be able to make such a thing, just use that "Hacker's Keyboard".

people familier with android (~~ broadcast reciever) , help me out.

I have two activities , main and second. from main , you can go to second if a broadcast is triggered. (eg if flight mode is on, you can go to second activity). I know how to make a reciever for this and the best case here should be that of a dynamic broadcast reciever.

But In the SecondActivity , i again want to implement a similer check, since anyone can turn the flight Mode on and off from the status bar.So if flight mode is on, certain layouts should be shown else not. again a reciever is required

My problem is : is static reciever a better choice, if yes then how can I interact with the reciever, like it should request changes only if either of the following activities are open and application is running..??

(And I don't know why daddy yankee's shaky shaky video is being played in the back of my head)

!rant
is pre-debugging a good thing?
I have a habit of implementing a project(for e.g. a mobile app) like this: See the project, break the tasks to be done into small parts(Like UI layouts- setting, listeners to implement , graphics involved, background threads required, databases necessary, etc.)and then code each of them step by step , while simultaneously testing their working (For all possible test cases I could think of ) side - by side. this results in my project getting developed in far more time than other people, but I always have something good and working all times to show to my bosses.But I really feel stupid when I spend 2 hours handling the animations and ui while I have yet to look into databases and other more important stuff

I guess that's a habit from my good old python days(its IDLE was a playstation for me) but I wish to know better approaches,if any?

Whatever happened to the startup "The grid"? The Artificial Intelligence that creates websites by deducing the layouts? Haven't heard from them in 3 years...

Okay so I'm one of those developers who haven't moved to constraint layouts yet. I've been working on heavily nested layouts (for obvious reasons) and the gravity chooses to kill the fun every time :))

TFW the interview computer doesn't have your keyboard installed

Any magic service creating resposive layouts from existing website? God I hate resposive css when there is no unified grid system across the design.

A certain company:

1) Forbids to run its proprietary operating system on hardware that is not produced by the company itself (BTW sold extremely overpriced). Virtual machines included.

2) Makes laptops with wrong and unusable keyboard layouts.

3) Does not sell any kind of servers that can be mounted on a rack.

Why should any open source project waste resources and time to support it? They should just be left alone with their crappy software and their overpriced hardware.

All app/web layout designers, I need your help with layouts for my app. I am struggling with a very specific thing: image sizes. What are the general guidelines for touch devices and windowed programs? Should I eyeball the max width and height? What if it's on desktop and I am making the window larger / smaller?

Any help is absolutely appreciated, I had perfect success in all of what I worked on in the app until now except this. I just can't get it right.

"Good ideas rarely come in bunches. The designer who voluntarily presents his client with a batch of layouts does so not out prolificacy, but out of uncertainty or fear. " - Paul Rand

"Back-end" ahahahaha

Translating:
Back-end developer (São Paulo / Brazil)

Vacant job: Back-end developer
Assignments: Work as a Back-end developer, PHP, and MySQL. Develop tools/applications for the web with a DB.

Technical skills: Technical knowledge in PHP, Framework Code Igniter, HTML5, JavaScript (jQuery, Bootstrap, Json, and Ajax), responsive layouts and WordPress.

Projecting and modeling DB Knowledge. Good knowledge of usability, Cross-browser (IE7+, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari).

Desirable: Knowledge on Graphic Design and Front-end projects

So we are supposed to go live with the website on thursday and i was just told we need to make layouts again to the website. I have changed the layout and design for the site 4 times already. Fuck the self righteous client for being condescending and my non technical project manager for always thinking the client is right!

In morning I thought to complete my work asap so I quickly went to office, started my laptop
....... after few mins it started.

I clicked on Android Studio Launcher......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... (after 15 mins) it started.

I clicked on the project to load..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................gradle is building message................................................................................................................build.gradle message..................................................................................................................after 30 mins it loaded.

Finally I did some code, made some UI changes in layouts and clicked on RUN :(
............................................................................................................................................10 mins.......................................... another 10 mins.............................................................................................. after 28 mins it ran on my device. At this moment I couldn't think to start emulator..

In the end I couldn't complete my work.

I decided to change the theme of my app to dark, apparently what I did was just reversing the colors throughout the app. So basically my only change was in the build.gradle file and layouts. I have received 6 bug report so far that the previous version worked well than the current version don't do so so functions. Now I am living in self denial.

Are there any experts (or casuals) here using Dvorak or any other alternative layouts? As someone who can type quite well with qwerty is it worth the time to cross over?

I tend to overengineer. Why? Because I had a view in JavaFX with its controller that had a bunch of key listeners which changed the UI. I wanted to change the view based on wifi connection/no connection with a server, which was managed in a Client class. The controller took the client to give it a message that client then had to send. For "separation of concerns" I created a separate view + controller for the "not connected" state.
Now the Client knew all about the connection, so I put up the Observer pattern and wanted the Main (Application) class to swap the layouts as an Observer of the Client. After an Exception on FX thread and Platform.runLater(), to solve the issue, I faced a new problem: the key presses weren't executed anymore. I still don't know why this happens. Maybe I'm missing something.🤷
Then met with one of my group partners (it's a uni project):
Let's attach the Observer to the original controller. Have only the original view that changes due to the controller updates as Observer. Let's see if that might even remotely work...🤔
It worked🤦😂

I just had a flashback to the good ole days of using HTML tables for website layouts. Tables within tables within tables were pretty ridiculous, but they really got the job done pretty well back then. It makes me think about how technology changes and a principle that was once so widely used is now almost completely obsolete.

So for my software engineering class we have to write a game in Java, and let me tell you, it has been a time.

The worst part so far has been the transition over to using a JLayeredPane, so that we actually have a background and a foreground. I offered to handle it, since I've done a bit with swing before now.

So I put together something that I thought should work, only to find that layered panes and layouts do NOT like to work together. So it was off to google...after sooo many hours of pouring over tutorials and javadocs I finally got the layers to draw...only to find that our Buttons had stopped working!

For some reason, putting the buttons inside a JPanel stopped them from actually informing their ActionListener (since the random test button I just added had actually still worked). So OF COURSE that meant I had to rework the buttons too, since their logic relied on that panel.

All in all, what should have been a relatively simple refactoring of our view was tranformed into almost a week's worth of frantic googling and pain through the magic of Java Swing.

Amazon is screwing with me.... So I was writing that Prime Recently Added Videos scraper but it's turning out that the Search results pages' layout changes each time. Like they're running multiple versions of the search engine that return the page in different layouts...

So after figuring out one of them... The whole thing breaks since I need to parse a different html layout...

First Android app in University. Actually it was a calendar application that was really shitty in the end because I wasnt confident with different layouts which led to big problems and performance issues later on. But its sth I can talk about in interviews until today if the interviewer asks me, which situation was really important to me as a programmer.

Changing Drupal theme layouts

Build a website for a private business: Cool.

Do it without being aware that frameworks are a thing and you shouldn't swear every day for a month to fix percentage layouts: Cooler.

Hear the customer complain about how much he liked a competitor website built on flash technology: Coolest.

Now I'm an iOS developer.

I really want to use mock design tools in order to better design my UI layouts, but my main working environment is Linux, and almost all design and prototyping tools I found until now have only Windows or Mac OS ports.

So I was working on one computer together with two other devs..

Is it reasonable to use materialize for a personal portfolio? I just like the minimalistic and simple appearance, and it makes making responsive layouts a breeze...

Also, I'm tired of using bootstrap for everything

Spent the entire weekend getting nothing done because my xorg won't work properly with my UK keyboard.

Turns out that the keymap was "gb" and not "uk", and because of the annoying utility used to set keymaps I didn't know...

Ok this will be silly guys, but this is my last hope, please help me. I am looking for a website "framework" but I can't remember the name. It is commercial, its website is all white using some black slab/serif fonts and it has a side navigation, the purpose of the framework is to easily create websites with full page scroll. it has multiple layouts, really similar to webslides or the slides framework from the guys at designmodo. If you know it or you are the developer behind it, please write link/name in comments thank you in advance!!

!rant

Anyone out there care to share a resource that they like for web app layout? Things I'm finding are more UX or just app clone versions.

I guess I'm looking for a book on standard layouts used.
Thanks

After using all this layouts in Android, it's a pain to go back to CSS for Web development.

FML, this kills the productivity.

!dev, sort of

So, apparently my Play Store settings get reset when I restart my phone, so Google decided to update Google Keyboard to Gboard for me (and god-fucking-dammit, that shit is absolutely useless to me). I can find older .apks on websites like APKmirror for Google Kinstall but they won't install, saying that "it seems like the package is corrupt". I'm not sure exactly why this might be happening, but according to APKmirror’s FAQ it might have something to do with cryptographic signatures or that a newer version is already installed on the device. Gboard is disabled and I assume that should be enough for that, and I don't know if it would even detect it as the same app in the first place, so my best guess is that it’s got to do with the former which is why I'm turning to you guys.
Does anyone have advice for a solution? I don't have any problems getting another keyboard either if needed, but I would really like something that both has separated layouts per language, as well as a similar swipe-to-type function, since excessive tapping really aggravates my CTS. :/ Any suggestions?