michalstanko

I have a hard time calling it a technological advancement, that's what it was when we had bloggers and forums some 20 years ago. Until we all collectively agree that kids should not have smartphones and iPads until they're maybe 17, or come up with a solution where they do have them but will only be able to use them for Maps, Books, Word/Excel, the Chrome Dino game, Tetris, and obviously messaging/calling with parents - without being the weird ones in the classroom. Until then, it's one ugly experiment which got completely out of hands.

Yes

>> Really feels like react has held back frontend development

Why? How?

>> but I'm sure people thought similar thoughts when jquery or angular were popular

I loved jQuery back in the day, and it helped bringing some native APIs to life thanks to its popularity.

It really depends on the people you work for, it's not like Europe is some kind of paradise in this matter. I was working as a contractor for a company in Germany, after a few years working together, they cut me off from one day to the next (the new manager decided to start saving money), even though my contract included a clause about a one-month notice period. They didn’t even bother to pay the invoice for the work I had already done that month (it was the 23rd of the month, so we’re talking about a few thousand euros). And since I wasn't living in Germany, extracting that money from them was almost impossible.

Yes, it may be different for full-time non-contract jobs, but once you're on a contract, nobody cares.

I wonder how many websites show a cookie banner and don't change a thing whether you click Accept or anything else.

Extremely annoying.

In my experience, having an email address ending with any custom domain other than "gmail.com" raises questions and clarifications are necessary quite often.

I guess the author did the website too quickly.

Features like auto-playing next song that Spotify/YouTube/whoever "thinks" I "might" like after a playlist finished playing is driving me mad. (Yes, I know it can be turned off, but it's on by default. Which reminds me, despite being a subscriber, I don't really like Spotify's UI on mobile, nor on the desktop.)

It scares me how much this reminds me of myself. I don't know how I was able to keep my job (and keep the roof over my family's heads) with my habit of not being able to concentrate on work at all because the minute I need to think a bit harder I immediately switch to reading news, HN or watching YouTube, only to finish my work late in the evening to save my ass (on good days).

> You may agree today, but that can change. The company's management or ownership can change.

I've lost over 7000 EUR of income from a German company over vague contract clauses which I was too lazy to sort out when signing it, because my boss and I had known each other for a long time when signing, and I fully trusted him. 3 years later, the company was sold, and the new boss started to randomly fire people on any given day he saw fit. One day I've got a call that I should stop working on my tasks immediately. I was supposed to be paid until the end of the month coming after the month in which the notice was given, but they've never paid - not even for those ~15 days I already worked in that month - and German courts could not care less, plus it was difficult/impossible for me to chase them, being based in another European country.

Always be careful about what exactly do you sign - the circumstances may change considerably, however unlikely it seems at the time.

Same as Chrome

I wouldn't go as far as calling it an "IE", because those of us who lived through that know it was a completely different experience.

But yes, Safari is slow in implementing new features a bit and it does get annoying from time to time. But it's nowhere near the IE hell from ~2000 - 2008.

The short answer: Tracking and advertising. Longer answer: All of the above + bloated frameworks (frontend and backend) + unoptimized/excessive static assets.

I guess we all know this, so I apologize if you meant it more as a rhetorical question.

As for Gmail, I've never had a problem, it's always pretty fast, considering all the features it has.

I apologize, last time I tried there wasn't yet this simple popup dialog Brave shows now, and I had issues making Netflix work in Brave some ~1.5 years ago.

Both Vivaldi and Brave have their advantages, but I had switched away from them. Vivaldi was too slow at times and some keyboard shortcuts in some apps (Google Docs, etc.) didn't work. Brave doesn't support Netflix and some other streaming services (for a noble reason, I believe, but - in the end, it just didn't work).

I used to love and use Opera back in 2000's. These days, I can't find a single browser that has all I want, so I ended up using multiple ones all the time.

What exactly is broken in Firefox on YouTube or Gmail? I'm not a heavy Firefox user, but when I try it every once in a while, I've never noticed anything broken on any of the Google's sites, even Maps and Docs worked just fine - but then, maybe I wasn't trying out some advanced features.

I understand the frustration from having your dreamed-up name taken by domain squatters, however, as we've seen many times, you can succeed with any domain name.

Google succeeded despite not having the search.com domain, Instagram didn't have the photos.com, and Uber did not own the taxi.com nor the ride.com.

Not sure why are you downvoted. It's hard to find a similarly popular band sharing more stuff online for free these days than Metallica. Besides, the entire Napster thing was about a song "I Disappear" being available through Napster BEFORE it was even finished and sent to CD manufacturing, and, don't forget, it all happened in 2000. It has not been on their radar for about 20 years now. Hating based on skimming headlines of inaccurate articles is surely easier than trying to understand the band's motives.

The only thing that helps me concentrate on work (coding) is exercising. When I come back from bike/run/whatever, catch my breath and take a shower, only after that my mind is calm enough so that I can concentrate well for ~2 hours. After that, you have to eat again, participate in a meeting, read your email, deal with messages from family, check the news, the latest coding tutorial, etc etc, and the concentration is gone, no matter how hard I try again later.

I worked in Visual Studio full-time for many years, now I'm coding in PhpStorm (IntelliJ IDEA) since July 2019, and while overall it's really powerful, I still kind of miss VS. One notable problem I have with PhpStorm is that oftentimes when I'm trying to find files or text in files, I press the respective keyboard shortcut and start typing immediately, in WebStorm the first few letters often end up being typed into the currently opened file instead of the "Find..." dialog, which never happened to me in VS. A minor issue, but it occurs every single day.

A similar thing makes me go nuts in Windows as well - in Windows 7 I pressed the WinKey and started typing immediately to find an application, never had a problem, but Windows 10 often misses the first few keystrokes after the Start menu opens. I can't believe this hasn't been fixed for years.

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EDIT: fixed a typo

I have been working as a JS dev for the past 17 years, I'm now 40, and what you wrote resonates with me so much. Even though I like coding and learning and trying out new stuff, I've developed this love for Spain's coasts, I just wish I could be there discovering it every single minute, being outside, being physically active. And the older I get, the more I feel this urgency to stop wasting my life at the desk. On the other hand, I have 2 small/ish children and a wife I need to provide for, virtually no savings, living in a landlocked Central European country with dark, cold winters. I wonder if I'm ever going to be able to escape this somehow and really do what I love, or be where I want to be, before I turn into an old man unable to do any physical activity.

And the winter is coming...again. :-(

;-)

P.S. Will definitely buy your book, so I can daydream with you.

For me he's synonymous with flying. First Lauda Air, then Fly Niki with Air Berlin and now Lauda Motion with Ryanair.

For me, as a developer, it boils down to the Web Dev Tools (Elements, Console, Network panels), which keep getting better and better.

For my family, Chrome is on desktop and their phones, everything synchronized. Chrome autoupdates without bothering them. Chrome is simple and it just works for them, and everything works in Chrome.

Please don't downvote me, I've been supporting Mozilla with monthly donations for years, and after Edge switches to Chromium, I'll probably increase the amount ;-) And I invite more of us to do the same. :-)

I'm not going to use Firefox for development and I'm not going to install Firefox for my family members, simply because Chrome is better for both scenarios. Firefox is pretty good, but Chrome is just better.

Instead, I send Mozilla some money every month (a small amount), because I still care that Firefox continues to be developed.

Minor correction - it's Bryan Cantrill, not Brian (according to Wikipedia).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill

This is very similar to what I'd do for my small projects, I really love the small size and the brevity of it.

On the contrary, it's not what I'd do at work for one of our bigger web apps.

No need to criticize, it does what it's supposed to.

Actually it's WebKit fork by Google called Blink.

And I do use Opera as a default browser.

The correct Ctrl+Tab behaviour which works like Alt+Tab (switch between the most recent tabs, with a small popup list of tabs) is the main reason for that. Much more productive for me than the usual "cycle over all of open tabs sequentially" behaviour that Chrome, Firefox, and everyone else have (except the Vivaldi browser).

I've been working remotely for 7 years now. Do you ever miss contact with other people? Fun in the office, interesting conversations, etc.

It's great that Firefox finally has this option and I'm surprised that so many people dislike it; it's the single most important feature why Opera is my default browser.

I guess the reason why it's confusing to people is that Firefox (just like Sublime) doesn't have that little popup displaying a list of tabs while switching, it would make all the difference in the user experience, and make things clear.