Save a slap for the dude who invented slaps!

As a mobile developer, tiny unhittable buttons drive me batshit. I used to get handed app design documents all the time that had these little buttons, along with image files for these buttons that were just large enough (width and height) for them. I would always do a trivial amount of extra work to make the actual tappable regions larger than the images to improve their usability, but when I mentioned this to the designers they would go apeshit and demand that I restore the original tiny tappable regions, usually with the bullshit rationale of that being what end-users expected and they didn’t want to verify that what I’d done to my best judgement was OK. Management would go along with the designers, on the grounds that enlarging the tappable regions required more time and effort - even though I’d already done it and undoing it would require even more time and effort.

It eventually occurred to me to just do it without telling anyone and I had no further problems.

A fun little fact about iOS: the operating system includes a private method (which is something developers supposedly can’t use without getting their app rejected) named _warpPoint. This hack was put in when they started supporting landscape, because the top toolbar and its tiny buttons became even tinier and virtually unusable in that mode. _warpPoint intercepts touches near the toolbar and changes the coordinates to the middle of the nearest button - basically doing the same thing I was doing by enlarging the tappable regions, just doing it at the global level. The irony is that they still don’t really work very well, despite the very existence of this method proving that Apple knows it’s a general problem.

YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO USES CAPSLOCK!

Many places I worked the recent college grads were paid as much as (or more than) the senior developers, so this strategy didn’t work. They still did it, though.

Years ago I got a copy of MSDN which had apparently been put together by developers who all had giant monitors. On a normal laptop screen none of the text wrapped properly so every article had a horizontal scrollbar which you had to work left and right to read every fucking line. I eventually had to start copying the contents into a Notepad instance just to be able to read the damn things normally.

This is why I think developers should always have to work on 10-year-old laptops with 800x600 screens.

I don’t understand why they don’t just put “My” on it: MyMail, MyOutlook etc.

I solved this dilemma by quitting and becoming a school bus driver. Now I only have to worry about middle-schoolers threatening to shoot me.

6 cans of Coke (Sam’s cola ftw) a day

Damn, that is 960 calories a day of soda. If you’re an average-sized man, that represents 40% of your daily diet (around 2500 cal per day).

Makes sense. Human beings don’t actually need proteins or fats.

“Special Envoy Carrot Top” has a nice ring to it.

For a while in the programming world “why are manhole covers round?” was a common question to be asked in interviews. I had no fucking clue the first time I was asked, but subsequently I would put on my deep pondering face and reason through it out loud and arrive at the correct answer, which never failed to impress the interviewer. After a few years I started owning up to the fact that I (and everyone else) had already heard that question.

“Where are the blue cups?”

I didn’t stop working when I burned out … I just became a school bus driver. Nothing like a 90% pay cut to spice up your life, but at least now I can’t be replaced by AI. sob

Scratch-n-sniff CSS

We might make million dollar mistakes, but it’s not likely anybody dies from it.

I had a coworker who got a gig writing PDA software for a remote-controlled baseball machine. He was to this day the most incompetent programmer I’ve ever met personally; his biggest mistake on this project was firing a 120 mph knuckleball (a pitch with no spin so its flight path is incredibly erratic) a foot over a 12-year-old kid’s head. This was the only time in my 25-year career that I had to physically restrain someone (the client, in this case) to prevent a fist fight. I replaced my coworker on the project after this and you can bet I took testing a little bit more seriously than he did.

I wrote a Classic ASP app in 1999 that placed a web UI atop a mainframe application that dated to the late '70s and allowed easy navigation of really enormous data structures. I learned last year that it’s still in use at that company; amazing not just because my code is still around but because that fucking mainframe code is still running.

both we and our customers need Cobol, Fortran, and other half-dead languages coders

Visual Basic? (fingers crossed)

Took me too long to understand this, you unt.

It’s more modern than Visual Source Safe, that’s for sure. I kind of miss the days of coworkers leaving for two-week vacations and forgetting to check their shit in first. It was a built-in excuse for the rest of us to not do anything and blame it all on vacation boy.

Their spell check sucks too. “I’m the capstan now!”