Current workload as dev lead:
- 1% actual development
- 2,5% waiting for SaaS to load
- 2,5% cursing company server network connectivity issues
- 5% switching VPNs
- 7,5% pkg management & deploys
- 10% writing JIRA and support tickets
- 12,5% filling in timesheets
- 15% coaching & reviewing a bot coworker
- 19% doing 2FA, refreshing expired passwords
- give up and spend the remaining 25% doing something meaningful

Premature timesheet delivery optimization. This slimy dude (third-party) pops in evangelizing cloud Ms Excel for "both our comfort" to submit a fucking timesheet, without any prior context

Cloud's slower, I don't have a local copy of it, and you can mess with the data cells, blurring responsibility for sync mistakes. No way I'm going to do that.

Until now I've just had the template locally, fill it in and send him the Excel file end of month and neither I or anyone that I know of have brought up issues with this process (mind you this was sth. he was responsible for, but he messed up so badly I took it over)

Case study on how hard Google Search sucks in 2024: search for "where can I find my likes on facebook android mobile". Search results on mobile:

- Youtube video fragment
- 4 videos
-""Related searches"
- Official instagram help page for likes
- Visually buried third-party neutral & correct help page
- 3 other results, one about desktop, one about iPhone
- image tiles without any added value except to "engage" you
- "People also sought"

Also why the fuck does FB bury your likes 8 clicks away:

Reasons my mother-in-law phones us:
- the laptop is not connected to wifi
- what is the password of our MS Office subscription?
- the website says I can only play videos without adblocker
- I want to keep track of a Youtube video link

:facepalm:

Markdown admonitions are unofficial extra's to the spec to render basic info/warning/note alert boxes. There were already 2 syntaxes for these:

Supported in python-markdown, Mkdocs, marked js extension: 3 exclamation marks followed by a type, and indenting its contents by 4 spaces:
!!! note

Supported by Docusaurus & extended by Nuxt.js as "MDC" or "markdown components": 3 or more colons followed by a type, and with an end delimiter:
:::note
:::

So why the fuck did Github have to go for this retarded syntax mixing blockquotes with half the syntax of an image link instead of following in the footsteps of others?

> [!NOTE]
>

A victory for open-source in the EU! https://blog.opensource.org/the-eur....

Also check out webmentions & IndieAuth if you haven't, good stuff

The ruling government coalition of my country officially prohibited ANY pay raises in 2024 and is likely to limit them until 2026, obliterated running tax exemption agreements on Intellectual Property specifically targeting software developers, raised tobacco taxes by 25%, killed fossil fuel-powered company cars while barely investing ANYTHING in electric infrastructure, and severely cut public transport funding.

AM I SUPPOSED TO JUST SIT BACK AND TAKE A YEARLY 5000 EURO LOSS WHILE MY MARKET VALUE INCREASES?? WTF man.

Good job centrists, greens, socialists and liberals. The only thing I can do to punish them is by voting for extreme left or right. Way to go to turn a law-abiding, moderate citizen into a riled-up, disillusioned mofo.

My biggest flaw when working in IT: I will refuse to prioritize time- consuming work with minimal added value (cf premature optimization, 0.001% edge cases) when I have a backlog of work that will add much more, obvious value and I will not budge to manager or architect power-plays and tendencies to micromanage my responsibilities, even if it may eventually end up getting me in trouble.

This is what you're in for when you go for THE state-of-the-art "React stack". What you see in the screenshot below is the hellofresh.be website (it's the same as .com). It uses Next.js, React, emotion & styled-components (2 CSS-in-JS libraries). It uses 140MB of RAM for a single tab with some product cards and a slider, logs 70 console errors in production, and fails to load 3/4 times on Firefox.

On mobile, opening a meal card to view its recipe literally takes up to 10 seconds (and I have good connection and performant devices) and you can't choose the last meal card because a f*ing overlay hides the "add" button. And this is a global company with millions in revenue.

All this bugginess has already resulted in incorrect or missed deliveries and they're not doing anything about it. F* you Next.js & F* you HelloFresh IT management

I found Server-Side Rendering in Next.js & astro a difficult sell (and I'm not a JS framework enthusiast), but this Solid JS SSR guide makes me want to consider it, maybe: https://solidjs.com/guides/server/. I really like the philosophy of one of their subpackages: https://github.com/solidjs/solid/...
This could inspire future enhancements to the foundations of my SSG, metalsmith.

Take a few seconds to reflect on the insane amount of human time and effort that goes into making development bearable or just possible on Windows.

A few examples: bash (MINGW & MSYS), make, symlinks, docker (docker-toolbox, WSL), Apache (W/X/LAMP)

RTFM (Read the manual)

Say you have some CMS webapp/site and you want to automate versioning of templates/ theming so you can do reliable rollbacks & more, and have the changes you make deployed to the webapp/site without further intervention.

How would you do it, in rough lines, from source change to auto-deploy?

I am wondering whether this is a good devops question and am curious about actual answers

After having witnessed developers use IntelliJ's built-in git functionality, I am persuaded that it should have never existed in the first place.

Asking you if you want to git add after every file you create, providing dangerous shortcuts that do pull, merge and push at once, but most importantly providing just enough comfort to keep their users ignorant about interactive git add or rebase, and other advanced git functionality.

The search for all the UI buttons + IntelliJ's baseline 5G RAM consumption is both slower and more error-prone than using the Git CLI

You know what´s really retarded?

How HP decided to put the delete key next to the power button on their Elitebooks (and make the power button part of the top keyboard row)

Travis CI

Down a non-technical rabbit hole yesterday:
- watch a cat bury his poop during smoke break
- google "why do cats bury their poop"
- click a link to the Felidae family
- get interested in the differences between puma's, cheetahs and tigers
- read up on the whole genealogy in detail
- spend an hour looking up the endangered status of Felidae
- close work laptop

"Nuff for today"

Competent software engineers are in high demand in Belgium. If you are looking for a workplace that treats devs as demi-Gods, relocate now.

Perks available to you are:
- working from home 2-5 days/ week.
- English at the workplace because the northern & southern parts don't speak each other's languages
- terrible rush hour traffic jams allowing you to flexibly choose your schedule as long as there is enough overlap
- pension & hospital insurance
- a company car (electric or fuel)
- ability to get away with any lack of soft skills as long as you're technically strong
- a competitive salary (2-4k/mo), even with almost half of it being eaten by taxes
- limited competition, because there's a sore lack of competent developers

MS Teams with multiple work accounts account swap flow:

1. Try to close the company-bound login modal 10x while being fast enough to also close the main Teams window.
2. Realize it's not gonna work, so login with the account you don't want to be on.
3. Have to type your phone pincode then accept the MS Authenticator login, and retype your pin code.
4. Finally logged in just to log back out and get the generic account choice modal so repeat step 2 & 3 with the correct account.

Seems like "Google Magic" and I have a disagreement (nb: this is the 4th of Snyk auto-follow up mails and I have no idea why they speak to me in French)

Looking back on it, I don't understand why I used merge commit strategy as go-to to merge git branches the first +-3 years of my career. It sucks

Guess I was just afraid of rebase after I accidentally erased history the first time I used it and failed.

Woah TIL

"Kinder Surprise is a hollow milk chocolate egg shell containing a toy. [...] it is banned in the US since the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits confectionary products containing 'non-nutritive objects'"

I loved collecting those toys as a child (and still love the chocolate)

Here I am at half past midnight with a pencil and a pair of scissors printing grayscale metalsmith js business cards and manually cutting them for the upcoming jsworldconference.

Not pretending it has a chance against the giant amount of sponsoring the likes of Vue and React get, but hey I will have tried!

Me at 3 front-end tech screenings of candidates with +3y of exp last year: "can you name a few npm commands you have used?"

Candidate:
- "Ehh.. npm start?" (npm start is a shortcut to a user-defined run-script)
- "npm version, it publishes the package" (wrong)
- "not going to pretend I know and sound stupid"

Mind you these candidates were not necessarily bad, but come on? You never used npm info, outdated, audit, install, remove, update, why, link, init?

Just look at the open issues counters for "state-of-the-art" "production-ready" JS packages:

https://github.com/storybookjs/....
Almost 1900.
https://github.com/vercel/next.js
More than 1200.

It's just depressing

My non-developer friend (who knows some very rudimentary basics about front-end web dev through me) asked ChatGPT to create a game with an arrow-key (left, right) movable player that shoots bullets.

He pasted the answer in a jsfiddle. The first iteration didn't work. It used DOM and CSS, so I told him he needed to instruct it to use HTML canvas. Lo and behold: https://jsfiddle.net/mehp8jay/

The cost of energy in the EU combined with 10% inflation (but not salary increase) has become crushing to the point offices and households shut off heating and use battery lamps and candles for light. Avg. Year total for energy is over 9000€ in Belgium! At this rate we will burn through our savings for basic utilities

Last week I conducted a FE React-JS tech interview (high-level, no coding challenge) with a potential new hire. He knew his stuff in React 16.8+ but I was baffled npm install was the only npm command he could name, he'd never heard about semver, never used SASS, and didn't have any Nodejs exp. I asked him to name a tough situation he encountered and solved in React, and he said "too many re-renders, so we used useMemo and useCallback" but that's kind of basic and it was evident he didn't understand this meant passing props by reference under the hood. So I wrote a very mixed report, but this is only the 3rd interview conducted. Was I too harsh? To me this signaled a lack of curiosity (especially for a self-taught programmer which he was). My manager was kind of disappointed about the guy following my report.

We've all been there before mastering git commit --amend, rebase, and squash

That's gotta hurt dawg: Emotion(a CSS-in-JS library)'s 2nd most active maintainer ditches own solution for SASS + CSS modules: https://dev.to/srmagura/...

Didn't feel right from the start. Everyone showing their true feelings for CSS-in-JS in the comment section.

Please tell me the next big thing will be going back to basics & not go to even more insane lenghts for marginal DX improvements.