One of the most / only satisfying things about frontend web dev is that, whether you're doing:

top
left
right
bottom

or

top
left
width
height

You get one more letter with each word. I am suspicious of anyone who orders these differently.

Anyone know of a decent AR image tracker which runs using WASM or WebGPU?

ChatGPT4: if you liked getting "wireframes" from fuckwit sales people, you're going to love getting "code" from them.

I mean, none of us are sad to see Twitter collapse or this great douche own himself on a daily basis, but even I'm starting to feel bad about the 'look, I know engineery stuff!' posts.

Gotta make a bullshit deck, not really my job, but I guess it makes a change...

Right-click, save image.

It's a webp file...

...oh just FUCK OFF WEBP YOU F-oh, actually, I'm making this in Google Slides. That's literally their own format! I'll just save these as webp, no need to worry.

(ten minutes and lots of saving later)

Drag a webp file into Google Slides, in Google Chrome:

"Sorry, this format is not supported."

Even your parents hate you, webp. Time to have a nice bath with a bar heater, webp.

I think, after a few weeks, I'm actually quite enjoying that the Android SDK is genuinely awful.

We all know the feeling: "This is shit, whoever designed this is a fuc...oh, I get it. This is pretty cool actually."

So, it's nice to encounter a genuine dumpster fire of a platform.

I think the beautiful thing about its absolute obsession with providing a context to every single operation, is that you end up passing it around so much that the very concept of context becomes redundant.

Honestly, half of the stuff in here I've just attached to a global statics class, because it saves having to request a context, or a manager or some fucking kind of adapter, and it works just fine.

I've started to laugh when I look up a solution and see the browser scrollbar shrink into infinity, because the recommended answer is about two whole pages' worth of boilerplate to make the back button disappear or something.

I don't think there's been a single moment where I've just been in the flow of writing code. Pretty much all of the process is grafting boilerplate into it.

Not long til deadline, thank fuck.

WEB FUCKING THREE

Ok, some of this shit is interesting, let's get that out of the way:

Crypto - great for doing illegal things, great for financial speculation, interesting mathematically. But as likely to replace actual currency as I am to replace the fucking Queen.

NFT - should be written on the headstone of humanity. Entirely fucking useless, planet-roasting bro-wank dressed up as a revolution in...pretending to own shit. The only difference between a Bored Ape owner and my nephew pointing at a castle and insisting that it's his, is that he isn't thousands and thousands of pounds out of pocket by doing so.

Metaverse - AR and VR have been around before this dogshit rebrand, and they'll outlive it.

No, it's not that. It's that we now have a new species of parasite - the "Web3/Metaverse" LinkedIn guru insisting that this shit is even needed, let alone the next big thing.

Web 2.0 was a stupid fucking term alright, but it did represent a new generation of technologies that were badly needed, and adopted by the entire community. Web3 is a bunch of shit that some cunts think they can get rich off, so insist that we need. I wouldn't even give a fuck but I've already spent hours of my life explaining to clients and peers that this is UTTER FUCKING BOLLOCKS, there's no need for a blockchain in your app, there's no need for a blockchain in virtually anything. Yeah if you want some fucking 3d in your app or your page I'm your man, but if you keep saying 'metaverse' I'm going to fill it with easter eggs.

None of this shit was needed before and none of it is needed after. Have you looked at web3 games? It's Steve Buscemi asking 'how do you do, fellow computer games?', it's a fucking gambling app pretending to be something a human would do. Clash of Clans and Candy Crush already cornered the market for that type of fucking mug, right now you're making the Candy Crush business model look responsible and efficient. You CUNTS.

Working with the Android SDK after about a decade of mostly avoiding ever having to do so directly...and fucking hell, nothing has changed.

It's still obtuse as fuck, you constantly have to provide contexts to operations which can't need them (there's only one fucking keyboard to close), and whilst they have added some new stuff which helps like Material, the APIs are just as mental, the setup just as elaborate and manual - and they don't seem to have deprecated anything along the way, so fifteen years of random software design decisions cohabit awkwardly together like the Bucket family.

I don't really mind Java, it's just long-winded C - but boy has it found its niche here. Your code is more boilerplate than not until you've written more than you'll mostly ever need to for an app.

At this point I'm just laughing when I come across another Stack Overflow solution for a trivial operation that involves writing an entire class. I would try Kotlin but this isn't a new project, and I'm not pissing another ingredient into this hot mess.

Alright, Android Studio is an improvement on Eclipse, but that's not really saying much.

Seriously, at what point did the good, kind, selfless souls who write tutorials and guides online turn into fucking food bloggers?

I've been an engineer about 15 years, so I still have to google most of the code I write as I write it, and this week I've been learning a new framework.

Ten years ago it'd be "here's how to..." then the thing you want to do.

Now it's "For the longest time, I didn't want to use Gradle..." followed by a summary of the last week in their life.

I really don't care about your Journey with Rust, I want to know how to define an optional parameter. I don't give a rat's fucking dick how much faster this is than that, my hands are tied by whoever started this mess - just tell me how to make it work.

I guess there's something to be said for remembering things between sessions.

Printpoints

Nothing like a personalised email from a recruiter

Recently helped someone with a Spark project and encountered “reactive JS” for the first and hopefully last time. Never minded using JS but happy to admit that it’s a dumpster fire design-wise…one that Spark engineers apparently decided didn’t have quite enough petrol on it.

Mad how Zuck can instantly stop everyone talking about all the creepy, weird shit by simply renaming the internet. Prince Andrew missed a trick there.

I've got a good 64-bit joke but it's long

A project got pushed live before it was finished, the final piece was supposed to enter site visitors into a draw to win a very expensive prize, but the first few thousand visitors hit the unfinished placeholder page...telling them they'd won said prize. Got noticed pretty quickly, not before a few million had to be claimed in business insurance to pay several thousand 'winners' off. The finger-pointing in the aftermath was quite fun to watch.

QA is essential.

People calling themselves "Thought Leaders" on LinkedIn.

Torn between wanting to know what the fuck this means and knowing that the answer will doubtless make me lose even more faith in humanity.

The one I just saw referred to as such (probably by himself) is that Simon Sinek goof who went viral a while back for saying that all millennials are useless lazy dopamine junkies because their parents spoiled them beyond repair. He looks like the kind of gold-plated twat who would definitely consider himself a Thought Leader, even though 'millennials are a bit lazy' is the kind of insight you can get down your local pub from the guy who'd otherwise be trying to sell you tickets to a dog fight.

How do you qualify as a Thought Leader? Do you just need to dress like salesman of the month, or do you actually need to be good at anything?

I love LinkedIn.

ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI

We've been asked to develop an app, normally we counter-pitch the 'web' prefix because it means one codebase, but they don't want that so...any suggestions for a decent cross-platform framework? App is just text and video, nothing too taxing for the device.

Empty create-react-app...262Mb

I do like npm but something has gone pretty fucko along the way.

I once had to make a shitty canvas game as part of a marketing campaign when I worked for an agency, for fuck only knows what. You dragged a shopping trolley back and forth in an aisle, and got points for catching items that fell from the top.

The initial round of feedback had the complaint that sometimes players weren't receiving points for items. I spent a night playing this senseless game over and over, but I never failed to get the points for an item. I was pretty confident that it worked, it wasn't like the logic was complex, so I sent it over.

Second round of feedback had the same complaint. They were getting quite annoyed by it, said that it was a bad user experience. Again, I could not reproduce it at all: the game was an equally tedious waste of life on every device I tried it on.

In exasperation, I asked the sales guy whose pitch it had been to get me a video or a more detailed report. The client was quite arsey, as they saw it, at having to do bug-fixing for us, but they did agree.

Anyway, it transpired that they were angry that players were not receiving the points for the items they *failed* to catch. The way they saw it, the game wouldn't be fun if you were punished for not catching items - so they wanted the player to get ten points for every item on screen, regardless or not of whether they caught it in their trolley. Of course, I thought. Silly me.

I was actually quite impressed at how a marketing department could accidentally undermine the very notion of a game whilst seeking to make one more fun.

Just learning Rust and I quite like it but the first thing the website says is that it's "BLAZING FAST" and to me this is a red flag up there with someone having toys in their car but no kids and a padlock on the boot.

I do think C# is the best language going. It's basically got everything, and VS is, weirdly for a Microsoft product, among the best IDEs. You get to thinking that it's actually harder to write unorganised code than not with it: it becomes difficult to imagine writing messy, repetitive or spaghetti code in C#.

Then you use Unity.

I once worked until 8am to get a demo ready for a client of the client. I knew the client was a bit thick, so I made some comprehensive video demos and sent them over to him, to save him trying to demo it himself. I wake up at 11am with him screaming down the phone at me:

“It doesn’t work, none of it works!”

“What do you mean?”

“I go to login and I can’t enter anything.”

“I haven’t sent you anything to log into...wait, are you trying to log into a video? Tell me you’re not trying to log into a video of a login page.”

“Uh...oh hang on, it just worked. Ok no pr-“

“No wait, what do you mean it worked?”

“I logged in fine.”

“It’s a video. You can’t log into a video.”

“Uh...alright, bye mate, thanks!”

The moral of the story is: never assume any level of intelligence on the part of a client, even if they exhibit signs of it at first. If they are paying you they will forget how to tie their own shoelaces.

Leave one TODO untended, six months later...

BLAZING FAST

I never see this said with reference to a fucking hardware driver or a shit hot games engine, it's always used to persuade me to use some fucking frontend framework.

It's JS, running in a browser, polishing the turd of the clapped-out DOM - I don't EXPECT it to be fast. I just don't want it to go completely to fuck straight away. The bar is so low that the core of the Earth is melting it.

Leverage. This is a noun, there is already a verb: lever. If 'levering' something doesn't sound good, well, that's because it's not an appropriate verb for what you are describing. We're better than the Marketing dept, stop wastaging everyone's time.