Ask HN: What annoys web developers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What annoys web developers?

9 pointsomidfi21 comments

I'm making a list of things that annoy web developers: https://github.com/omidfi/how-to-annoy-a-web-developer

Please help!

This happened just yesterday.

Had to write a custom blog system for my day job (they don't like wordpress or etc...) Blog has been in production for months now.

Yesterday, I get an email from the blog author:

"I'd like to let you know that I'm noticing some issues with how the new Blog Comment System is working. I have been noticing these things the past couple months, and despite trying to work around them, I feel they are making it hard to get done what I need to do."

15 minutes after she sent the email, she called me (I was in a meeting), she then called another programmer who has nothing to do with the blog, who was in the same meeting, then sent a followup email to my boss making sure I got the email.

Hold on - you found a bug, you've known this was a bug for "months" now and your reporting it now? Further, months have passed until your now reporting the bug, but because I didn't acknowledge the email because I was in a meeting, your now going down the phone list, panicked, apparently, looking for help?

The devil in me says don't fix the bug for months also but I know that won't fly.

Nice, I'll add it there :)

When somebody who has nothing to do with programming tells you "it seems like a small bug and can be fixed pretty quickly"

"It's just a button, how hard can it be?"

Few things:

1. Can you just add another box to the right ?

2. Can you give me xyz similar to website A but mix it with ABC from website B ? sorry, I want a bit of both.

3. Can you change this text on the button ? (Hint: No I don't want to. It requires a code change in my SAAS and could impact other clients)

4. My page loads too slow according to Google Page Speed.

5. Can I not require users to activate their email during initial sign up ? This scares potential sign-ups and we lose conversions. (Hint: No, otherwise you will get fake emails and cannot contact them anyway to up-sell)

6. My site is down. (Hint: You need to clear DNS cache as after moving your site to a new host, your computer is still trying to hit the old DNS settings).

Regarding 5, it actually does make sense for some products to defer email confirmation to post-signup (possibly gating features, etc). It's more work but depending on the situation it could have a very positive impact.

Re 6. If you used a DNS provider with a short TTL that problem can be minimized very easily.

3a, Bosses that can't say no to this type of request and the system becomes unmaintainable because of a million customizations.

When users don't focus on describing a problem but instead are trying to offer a solution or even prescribe an implementation.

Nice one!

You should ask what annoys users.

Pop-ups/lightboxes.

Changing the default scrolling behavior.

Sites crippled with ads.

Slow sites.

Google analytics everywhere.

Unreadable text (light gray on white, what could go wrong?)

Unzoomable sites. You know not all people can see perfectly well. I need to zoom to be able to read.

Sites working only on $X browser.

Headers sticking to the top, consuming screen space.

Lots, of other stuff...

Yes the pattern is the same, more often than not developers feel the same pain developing things that breaks UX, as the users who use them

Most of the time these things annoy web developers as well since it was not something they want to do and add. The reality is that designers, management and clients just come up with something in their heads and you have to do it. Another thing that annoys me personally is that they worked on it for a week or a month and then they expect developers to magically put it online in a day. They took their time finishing their jobs and then they apply pressure for stuff to be up as soon as possible.

Weird APIs. I have had to work with APIs that:

- Require all requests to be of the multipart variety.

- Only accept post requests.

- Only return 200 or 404 http codes.

- The request must be in urlencoded formatting but the response is in (invalid) json.

- Function names are mapped to URLs. Example:

    do_some_stuff() becomes /do/some/stuff/

All valid points thanks!

A list of things that DONT annoy developers will probably be shorter.

Standards, modules and legacy technologies and frameworks (older than 6 months).

When recruiters blatantly miscapitalize technology names: Jquery or JQuery for instance.

The latest javascript framework your boss wants you to learn?..

Lack of a decent type system in JS.

This post annoys me. It's not very productive.

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