There are so many great ways to annoy your developer these days, it’s hard to keep up with the latest tips and tricks.
I’ve been annoying developers for a while now and I think I’m pretty good at it, but in doing so have unfortunately become one myself.
This post serves as both a step by step guide and resource of the best ways to annoy the crap out of your developer, and maybe at the end of the day… make a developer’s life a little easier.
Step 1: Vagueness
“It’s not working”
“Doesn’t look right”
“Just change it a bit”
These types of comments usually result in a series of artistically worded question and answer emails. I can’t emphasize enough how important this step is as it serves as the foundation to driving a developer round the bend; the more vague you can be the better the results.
But if you love your dev and don’t want him committing seppuku you might want to be as verbose as possible in your bug report, the more info the merrier. If you took a screenshot and had steps to recreate the bug; you would get a gold star. If you also added a “whatsmybrowser.org” link then you would be viewed as the saviour of humanity.
Step 2: Pasting into your CMS from Microsoft Word
“WOW this looks terrible, what the hell did you do?”
“Um, I just pasted the content in?”
<table><span class="style22">4 bedroom House </span><br /><tr></td><span class="style27" style="font-size: 18px;color: #009bdf;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold;"><strong>$130 per night </strong><strong class="Style33" style="font-size: 18px;color: #009bdf;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold;">$100 per night</strong></span><br /> <a href="holiday%20home%20pages/home.html" onmouseout="MM_swapImgRestore()" onmouseover="MM_swapImage('Click Here22','','images/homes/click here blue.jpg',1)"><img src="images/homes/click%20here%20grey.jpg" alt="" name="Click Here22" id="Click Here22" border="0" height="25" width="276" /></a></span></td>
Use this one great trick to really screw up a page! Heck, you might even be able to get a developer to clean up your messy content! ╰( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )つ──☆*:・ﾟ
Some content management systems (CMS) these days are able to clean up pasted code, but usually there’s a source code view option floating around the text editor somewhere. By using that and pasting in your content, you strip out any nasty tags from when the content came from. But then again… we are here to piss off the devs so you might not want to do that.
Step 3: Big changes in project scope, aka The Pivot
“The marketing team says we need to change our “Bathroom Renovation” app into a “Vegan Cheese Detection” app to boost our ROI”
I’m not sure what to say about this. I can’t believe I’m actually writing down my own nightmares at this point. A lot of work has been done in the app to set the foundation on which other decisions are built on top of. Now most of those decisions are defunct and all that work is about to go falling off the proverbial cliff along with any sanity the developer has left. He will try to curtail his madness and provide a solution by saying “We might need to start again”. This is him opening a door in his mind to light and love and freedom from legacy dread, but you need to shut that door down as fast as possible and let him know that: “Hell no, we’re not starting again, we’re just changing it” Mwaaahahaaaaa… ha…. ahem.
Of course some changes aren’t so big as to completely redo the whole project but that’s why good planning is crucial. Once you get to development stage you need to have everything planned so it doesn’t become a tangled mess of script and duct taped CSS.
In closing:
Developers are human, they are us, we are them. Most of us just want to create a really great product and are usually quite enthusiastic about it. But if you hate your developer try to use these tricks as much as possible.
Extracurricular (bonus points):
Some clever developers have created a git page that gives you annoying ideas based on who you are. They’re either suicidal or just mad funny. I reckon it should be printed as a bible one day.
