Most people cannot begin to comprehend that just having the field on the form doesn’t magically make it do anything. Like, yeah, I can add a field to the form in five minutes, but if you want it to actually work, it’ll take time.
To be fair to the client, I, as a programmer, often struggle to estimate tasks with accuracy, and am very often at a loss at even explaining to co-workers why some things are easy and others impossible.
I once just asked how long if would take them to swap the chair and the table, and how long it would take to swap the window and that pillar. After all, it’s just moving stuff around. They understood after that.
Careful, that table is critical for getting airflow over that server in the corner. If you move the table it will overheat and cause a cascade of failures and bankrupt the entire company.
You’ve just reminded me of a funny time when playing the game Eco with friends. It’s sort of like Minecraft but themed around ecological sustainable technological development, and the specialised labour necessary to make that happen. There were about 8 of us in total, and we would drop in and drop out over the course of a month
The way the electric power system worked in Eco is that in addition to dedicated objects you could place to expand the electrical grid, objects that use electricity could also act as repeaters, albeit with a much smaller radius. They didn’t even need to be physically connected up to power for this to work. They weren’t intended to be used as repeaters; the radius thing was just an artifact of how the electricity mechanic was implemented, to ensure that it wasn’t too complex to build an electric grid.
When we were short of materials and expanding our settlements, I ended up implementing a kludge solution of just placing a few unconnected water pumps between our power station and the place we needed to connect to the grid. It was only intended to be a temporary solution — but there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
nipped off the server for a little while, and when I came back, everything had gone to hell due to massive outages across the entire grid. After a while of fruitless troubleshooting, I happened to walk past one of the places where there had previously been a water pump, but there was no longer. I discovered that someone had removed it as part of routine tidying up the world.
Surprised and exasperated, I asked my friend why they removed it, and they (justifiably) responded indignantly with “Well I’m sorry! I didn’t know that it was a load bearing water pump!”. “Load bearing water pump” ended up becoming a recurring joke in my friend group, persisting long after we finished playing Eco. The situation really captures the absurd inevitability of this kind of change
He was okay when I explained that the custom Magento plugin was written in Bulgarian and I had to translate it before attempting to understand the convoluted mess I’d been given.
I had a client who thought I was a miracle worker for changing the color of every link on the site in under an hour.
Then he got mad because it took me three days to add one field to a form.
Most people cannot begin to comprehend that just having the field on the form doesn’t magically make it do anything. Like, yeah, I can add a field to the form in five minutes, but if you want it to actually work, it’ll take time.
Design mock ups are the bane of my existence.
What do you mean it’ll take 6 months…you have almost all the work done in your demo.
I made some buttons that navigate between pages that have laid out controls on them. Other than those specific navigations…nothing works.
Dotcom days, my company charged a venue $30k for an “emergency change” to disable a form and all links to it.
The dev already had a system switch for it. $30k, 10-second change.
a { color: pink; }And then you realize that the previous programmer abused the anchors to build all of the buttons.
And 50% of the styles are marked as !important
Hey it’s not my fault, this project was started in 2018 and they choose to use bootstrap.
Oh god I didn’t expect that to give me the level of PTSD flashback that it did.
Fuck bootstrap with a rusty pitchfork.
It’s not as bad as it used to be. Some things require you to use a few more selectors that you’d normally write, but that’s really only tables.
Most stuff is exposed via CSS variables nowadays.
Good to know.
I have not touched it in several years so I just remember the 2013-2019 onslaught of bootstrap.
To be fair to the client, I, as a programmer, often struggle to estimate tasks with accuracy, and am very often at a loss at even explaining to co-workers why some things are easy and others impossible.
I’ve never felt more called out.
I once just asked how long if would take them to swap the chair and the table, and how long it would take to swap the window and that pillar. After all, it’s just moving stuff around. They understood after that.
Careful, that table is critical for getting airflow over that server in the corner. If you move the table it will overheat and cause a cascade of failures and bankrupt the entire company.
And that’s a load bearing chair.
You’ve just reminded me of a funny time when playing the game Eco with friends. It’s sort of like Minecraft but themed around ecological sustainable technological development, and the specialised labour necessary to make that happen. There were about 8 of us in total, and we would drop in and drop out over the course of a month
The way the electric power system worked in Eco is that in addition to dedicated objects you could place to expand the electrical grid, objects that use electricity could also act as repeaters, albeit with a much smaller radius. They didn’t even need to be physically connected up to power for this to work. They weren’t intended to be used as repeaters; the radius thing was just an artifact of how the electricity mechanic was implemented, to ensure that it wasn’t too complex to build an electric grid.
When we were short of materials and expanding our settlements, I ended up implementing a kludge solution of just placing a few unconnected water pumps between our power station and the place we needed to connect to the grid. It was only intended to be a temporary solution — but there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
nipped off the server for a little while, and when I came back, everything had gone to hell due to massive outages across the entire grid. After a while of fruitless troubleshooting, I happened to walk past one of the places where there had previously been a water pump, but there was no longer. I discovered that someone had removed it as part of routine tidying up the world.
Surprised and exasperated, I asked my friend why they removed it, and they (justifiably) responded indignantly with “Well I’m sorry! I didn’t know that it was a load bearing water pump!”. “Load bearing water pump” ended up becoming a recurring joke in my friend group, persisting long after we finished playing Eco. The situation really captures the absurd inevitability of this kind of change
I like that metaphor. I’m gonna use it next time I have to talk to a non-technical.
He was okay when I explained that the custom Magento plugin was written in Bulgarian and I had to translate it before attempting to understand the convoluted mess I’d been given.
Should take you an hour of just testing.