ELSTER, Germany's federal tax office online service seemed to be one of the few examples of successful digitization. But don't wait until the last minute for tax declarations online when everybody else has the same idea and federal ELSTER server slows down and throws a lot of exceptions turning into a federal point of failure today.

Back in Germany, the land of fast cars and slow internet, where rich people preach austerity to prevent improving any kind of infrastructure. How can a first-world country in the heart of Europe suck so badly when it comes to connectivity and train travel?

Cross the border to any other country in Europe and you will notice immediately because suddenly the web just works as it's supposed to be...

A tech stack including Microsoft Teams, Apple Safari, and WordPress - all in the same project - might have been a red flag not to work with that agency

A former team lead decided the team should review any open PR before proceeding with their own tasks after their breaks. Any open PR also meant reviewing refinements in an ongoing discussion. Several times, we wasted time for review, coding, and discussing when the second reviewer asked to revert the changes introduced according to the requests of the first reviewer.

Now as a freelancer, in smaller projects, I sometimes have no coworkers to review my code. So, apart from testing, I try to pay more attention to linters, static code analysis and automated coding assistance. I have stylelint, eslint, SonarLint, and possibly some more IDE inspections. For the infamous popular blogging software, I also have a so-called PHP code sniffer that checks all PHP and JavaScript code for compliance with the WordPress coding styles, so finally, I got the team experience back: SonarLint suggests removing unnecessary spaces and reformating my code, which in turn makes PHPCS complain that the code violates the legacy code style.

Trying to make use of Google Maps. Search results are always sorted by "most relevant" by default, instead of by distance. Always I switch to distance, next search goes "most relevant" instead, which should be labelled "most irrelevant" instead, as it seems to be an excuse to show a list with promoted businesses not only far away, but often unrelated to my actual query. Wasn't Google supposed to be some sort of search engine experts? or at least the lesser evil of search engines? Oh wait, no, they're actually an advertising company, and it shows. Fuck you, Google. Where am I going to throw my Pixel phone and why did I open your shitty apps in the first place? I should switch MY own defaults back to Open Street Map etc.

Git: "Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout. [...]
Please commit your changes or stash them before you switch branches.
Aborting"

Fucking nitpicking, that's not "Aborting", that's meant to be:
"Dear user, would you like to overwrite your current changes, even more so as you are currently in a so-called detached head state anyway, as you obviously just checked out an old tag to try a temporary rebuild of an old project state."
Yes, the build targets are checked in, as this can be very useful in some scenarios.
It's just! some! CSS! from the SCSS!
Stop "Aborting"!

WooCommerce sucks, Block editor sucks, Elementor is no better, but if you want a real mess, just add more plugins. Bonus: if you use any "third party WordPress plugin", WooCommerce support can always say, oh yeah, I see that you are using a third party plugin, so we cannot support you, sorry.

Fuck, that's not the kind of front-end development that I was hoping to do in 2023.

Hey Google, please stop ignoring 3 out of 5 words in my search queries ever so often. I have been getting tired of the unhelpful note "missing: " followed by the most relevant parts of my question.

Can't wait for Microsoft to add openAI to Bing. While I'm more than sceptical about its use, at least it might end Google's quasi-monopoly in the search engine market and bring back some competition.

Password must include at least one uppercase letter, lowercase letter, number, and symbol ~!@#$%^*-&;?+_. No other types of characters are allowed.

Looking back on 2022 from a developer's perspective, even without talking politics, war, climate, health, and injustice, despite CSS updates and AI progress, it feels like two steps forward, one step back. I used to curse ReactJS and Webpack, but we can have breaking changes everywhere else, like PHP 8 vs. WordPress. Oh yeah, and why do customers still love WordPress so much that we have to mess with this unstable abomination with its half-baked Gutenberg block editor and (full) site editing? And what about "social" media? Well, never mind, after Usenet and Myspace, why did people favour Facebook and Twitter in the first place? Thanks to devRant, there is at least one site where I rant about obscure tech topics from my subjective point of view, using swear words and exaggeration, without getting downvotes. Maybe I am even allowed to say "Mastodon" here? Thanks and merry Chanukka, Jul, X-Mas, Y-Mas, and Z-Mas and a happy new year everybody!

After I have been using tabnine and Grammarly for quite some time, I thought I follow this years' hype and give GitHub Codepilot a try, before eventually considering chatGPT.

Added Copilot to my IDE, proceeded to extend behavioral test descriptions in JavaScript.

Copilot suggests the most redundant and irrelevant inline comments I can imagine. They would be a legitimate target of criticism in every code review.

Wasn't it supposed to add some code that's actually useful? Well, tabnine and JetBrains IDEA annotations already did that anyway.

What did I miss?

Twitter is much like devRant but less fun.

Maybe the twitter developers getting laid off should join spotify in their quest for a simple shuffle algorithm that they failed to develop or maybe just are not allowed to ship due to corrupt company politics?

As Spotify's algorithm sucks from a listener's perspective (major music industry might like it though), I have to rely 100% on curated playlists, and without shuffle, I have to listen in the exact order that they were made. Why not? We did the same when we put actual records on a record player. Who needs shuffle? Who needs streaming anyway? I'm gonna get a pair of turntables or just listen to MP3 files again!

There is a "new idea" thread in the spotify community forum started in 2020 (following up on an earlier 2012 suggestion), a feature request for the "option to have a true shuffle" that already has 70+ pages, tagged as trending in 2021 with the friendly stalling message:

As this idea has gathered a fair amount of votes, we've discussed it with the relevant team once again. We actually want to take a closer look at what you're experiencing and get some of you in touch with our devs.

Good luck everyone. If I still use Spotify in 2023, I can probably repost the very same status again one year later when the app will still lack a simple shuffle option, no?

https://community.spotify.com/t5/...

StackOverflow, if the community's peer review process is as good as you claim, why would you have to fear any AI / chatGPT generated content after all?

Notice today: "We do not currently allow content pasted from ChatGPT on Stack Overflow; read our policy here."

Microsoft, please stop the incomprehensible work vs. school account stuff and if you want to mail me a login code, then please actually do send an email. What's wrong with Microsoft Teams and office always giving its users headaches already when trying to log in?

A customer sent me a "FindTime" link, something like Calendso / Calendly, but "powered" by Microsoft Office. Seems that their power is off again, like ever so often. Microsoft: "can't access your account: You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead."

Okay, go to bing, and search your error message. Try to use bing page to log in to my account: Microsoft: "We emailed a code." (No you didn't. At least I never received anything. And, yes, I did check my spam folder!) Microsoft: "Other ways to sign in: use Microsoft Authenticator".

me: "dear customer, please feel free to pick any time and date that matches your preference, as the FindTime link has been impossible to use".

How can Microsoft make me feel so dumb again, after more than 20 years as a developer? Have they ever heard about usability?

I will delete my question. Fuck you all! Fuck Shopware and your lack of support! Fuck StackOverflow and your erratic standards of downvoting, deleting, or simply ignoring helpful questions, while piling up React and jQuery details bullshit. Fuck you all seriously! Just typing this to see if anyone of you yankees cares enough to down vote or ban me. Fuck the fucking fuckers!

StackOverflow gatekeepers: "Voting is already communicating." Maybe it is, but in such a minimal way like an error message saying "an error occurred". Sadly this is current UX as well as long as nerds are in charge. Sometimes I feel ashamed to be a developer. Are we human or robots?

After deleting an AskUbuntu question due to peer pressure pointing out that it is "off-topic because parts are off-topic, and parts are written as a rant in disguise", I decided that DevRant is where to repost this instead:

As a user, how can I make sure to keep my applications as a user without keeping obsolete software packages?

Upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellifish) using the Software Updater GUI removes a working installation of the zoom video meeting application, without installing any upgrade, during the "cleanup" step.

Unfortunately, we can only choose either to remove or keep all suggested removals. While every other removal seemed fine and had a good explanation (either an outdated version number or the move to update Firefox via snap packages in the future), only zoom, at the end of the list, was scheduled for removal without any replacement.

After proceeding with the removals and restarting my computer, as expected, zoom is gone.

I am posting this to inform others before the upgrade, but also trying to help solve the problem, so that either there should be an option to select which packages to keep or remove (maybe there is when using the command line instead of the GUI?) or not to suggest to remove zoom at all. If it had been removed as an outdated third-party source without official 22.04 support, it would have been helpful to communicate that more explicitly.

As the latest zoom version, 5.12.2 (4816) deb (for Ubuntu 16.04+), obviously supports everything from 16.04, there should be no reason at all to remove zoom when upgrading an Ubuntu distribution.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/...

Most web developers don't seem to care at all about ecological footprint and UX/UI impact on people and society, like they never cared about accessibility either, desperately dreaming to work for the Californian oligopoly companies that shaped our current digital infrastructure.

Meanwhile, rivers run dry, forest are burning, people starving and soldiers killing people.

But politics is taboo, even on devrant. Let's post a funny thank-God(?!)-it's-Friday GIF animation instead!?

What kind of people do we want to be?

Google Photos <-> Google Drive <-> Google Keep <-> Google Calendar interoperability is _very_ limited as I already knew, but it seems to be even worse for "non-technical" people trying to actually use it

Apple, please roll out the latest Safari to older iOS versions at last! Don't let it stay the new Internet Explorer making us web developers mad about obscure issues that customers face having to use outdated browsers, overshadowing any joy about your latest achievements.

StackOverflow veterans: "this is an elitist meritocracy, so play by the rules to earn reputation and practice the same gatekeeping behavior that we have established for years." Then they wonder why mostly white male US academic guys keep engaging in their community.

Yes, it's "stackoverflow again".

Another one of those sites you can't really avoid as a dev, too good to ignore, to bad not to get upset about. Maybe also a mirror of antisocial patterns still prevalent in society and especially in the developer industry.

Trying to actually use tailwindcss makes me start hating it already. Instead of just adding a CSS style that I know without looking up, I have to look up the documentation to find a tailwind class name that contains the styles that I want to use. I still think it is great for beginners, but otherwise we have to learn two languages (CSS and TailwindCSS) instead of one now?

Twitter should be connected to a health tracking device so that users would only be able to reply to tweets as long as their pulse and blood pressure is still on a relaxed level. This could prevent dysfunctional "social" media "discussions" a lot.

User: looking up anything in Google Help Center (support.google.com)
Google: (bunch of outdated or misleading answers)
Google: This question is locked and replying has been disabled.

To make it even worse: "Please note that this forum is run by volunteers known as Google Product Experts who are not Google employees and are merely advising on best practices and interpreting Google's policies based on their experience."

So Google uses the free work of volunteers dabbling workarounds for their bugs and misfeatures and, despite Google's reputation as a search engine, fails to present their end users helpful, up to date information.

Dear Google, why not just offer a paid version of your free service where users can actually expect quality of service? I remember the internet before Google and I can't wait for the internet after Google! Seriously!

Dear BOSE, how can you make a "smart" speaker so dumb and complicated? Why require to use an app that needs frequent updates and takes up so much storage space for ... what exactly?
Dear Spotify, why not add features to the web player if your app does not run on older devices? Which native feature would your app need that is missing on iOS 13?
Dear companies making money due to the fact that some real artists make real music that real people love to listen to, how come your apps and gadgets always make me nostalgic about actual records and make me tune in to an actual radio station at the end of the day? At least you keep showing us not to rely on digital technology and rather go visit actual live concerts to listen to live music in the real world more often!

Thanks google for creating the illusion of an option to change the shipping address for a repair order. You even mention the new address in your notification email, but when I click on UPS tracking, I can see that you sent the shipment to the old address, which is in a different city where I can't quickly go to pick up my repaired phone. After charging an extra 95,- Euros for additional damage supposedly not covered by my warranty. Lucky you that my old phone had connection problems with the shitty Vodafone station wi-fi router, which is one of the few reasons that I still even want to use a google hardware product. Thanks google for just being slightly less wretched and mediocre than your competitors, that might grant you some more years before you will be buried in history forever. Pixel phones are just like Macbooks: high quality product and good marketing, good enough to make your customer accept everything else being bullshit. Google search is even worse, but based on the same concept: just suck a little less than your competitors but don't waste any effort trying to actually be really good at anything.

Google Business Profile is probably not meant for developers. "Help customers find your business by industry." Dev: set primary category to "Web Developer". Google: We didn't understand your category. Please select from the suggestions that appear when typing. Dev, typing: "Web D"... Google suggests: "Web Designer, Web hosting company, Well drilling contractor, Waterbed shop". Okay, Google, nevermind.
Google: "Update your customers. Keep your customers up to date about your business!" Dev clicks "add update", adds info about that customer should use different phone number temporarily due to broken phone. Google: "Your post has been removed from your Business Profile on Google because it violates one or more of our post content policies." Okay Google, at least you let me add an additional phone number on my profile without requiring to verify my primary number that I currently have not access to. Anything else?
Google: "Claim your €400 free advertising credit" Dev: clicks "claim credit" Google: "To access this Google Ads account, enable 2-Step Verification in your Google account." How to combine idiocy and deceptive patterns in a single UI: Google knows! Apart from their search engine, their unique business advantage is simple that they suck a little less than Apple and Microsoft. Sorry, not a day to be proud of our profession, once again.

What sucks most about smartphones is how much everyone came to rely on them and expect you to have one which is turned on and working. Rent a bike? Need an app! Log in somewhere? Need 2FA. I just want to leave my phone turned off for a few days like in the good old days. There must be something wrong with the way we live.

f it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I feared my Android phone's touchscreen suffered severe damage from using it in the rain, until I discovered that the 3-button navigation stopped working after an Android 12 security update (both in Nova launcher as well as in official Google Pixel launcher). Wasted time drying the unplugged phone and googling for repair options before finally wasting more time changing system settings back and forth, rebooting, changing system settings, rebooting, etc.
Remember those happy times before mobile phones have been invented, which of course I don't really want back either. I just want developers to stop breaking features that used to work. Regression testing outside the happy path, anyone? I mean, it's not a hacked maker project, it's a commercial phone that I bought and intend to use with the latest official software. Don't want to think about the next breaking changes that Android 13 might bring.