What was your most painful work or task, as web dev?
Mine, was a couple of years ago, when I decided to refresh all my sites (which means PHP scripts and MariaDB) to handle UTF8 Multibytes data. This was really a pain, to convert all the data, and review all the inputs and outputs to be sure to have the same char encoding from end to end.
tangor
12:27 am on Oct 5, 2019 (gmt 0)
Getting up in the morning? :)
Making the transition to responsive was my hurdle. After that, and fully embracing CSS, things got a lot easier.
lucy24
12:59 am on Oct 5, 2019 (gmt 0)
An almost entirely unnecessary task which I have nevertheless set myself: keep track of all redirects, forever. It's soooo tedious, and is in fact the only reason I have one site that is still HTTP. (I keep saying I'll do it next month.)
iamlost
1:42 am on Oct 5, 2019 (gmt 0)
Because webdev has been a quarter century of critical change after crucial change (rinse, repeat) picking the most painful work or task really comes down to eeny meeny miny moe. This is as reduced as I've managed to get:
* for contract: design-build a multi-dimensional database and GUI.
*for myself: ---back end - it's a tie!: 1. design-build a proprietary CMS (of type usually termed dynamic component CMS) 2. design-acquire-build high availability server architecture that includes realtime bot defence and contextual delivery with machine learning analytics inputs.
---front end: switch from table layout to CSS. Note: and having it all look equivalent in NN4.x and IE5.x ... Note: with grateful thanks to WebmasterWorld especially Claire (SuzyUK) Campbell.
Marshall
5:39 am on Oct 5, 2019 (gmt 0)
Migrating sites to new hosting companies, especially e-commerce sites. Biggest pain is finding every file path that needs changed.Migrating email accounts is no fun either.
NickMNS
7:09 pm on Oct 5, 2019 (gmt 0)
mod_wsgi
brotherhood of LAN
8:18 pm on Oct 5, 2019 (gmt 0)
Solving complex problems I haven't dealt with before, requires new thinking.
TBH for most 'regular' stuff there are tools to help you on your way.
I find my most counter-productive thing is organising data/files/knowledge into an intuitive layout, for dealing with in the now and future. Seems like in reality if you have X years of experience you can automate a lot of things, but half the trick is in knowing when/how and where you put it..
On a menial level, it was code formatting, but I've found plugins that'll automatically sort that
lucy24
10:53 pm on Oct 5, 2019 (gmt 0)
The dreariest and most loathsome task is one that I consistently block from my mind until the moment arrives when I have to do it: coming up with alts for a book's worth of images at once. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Last time I got a free ride because it was an architectural work (why don't I do more of those?) and I could put in a global "view and floor plans of house described in text", followed by eyeballing the book to spot the ones where "view" has to be replaced by, or supplemented with, "elevation", plus a couple of "section" for variety's sake.
Now I've got seventy unfilled alts staring me in the face. (I counted.) And that's after deciding that a further batch of 80-odd illustrations will not improve the book. Fortunately I figured this out before starting on the the alts, and also before inserting more than a dozen or so into the text, at which point I realized the venture was impossible. “Too many images” is not something I find myself saying very often. (I once read a novel that had too many cats, an utterance of equal if not greater rarity.)
graeme_p
11:26 am on Oct 8, 2019 (gmt 0)
Trying to convince clients that what they like is not necessarily what their users like or what will generate sales
nmbrsk
1:21 pm on Oct 8, 2019 (gmt 0)
For my own site, going from a shared hosting plan to a self-serviced VPS and getting everything to work smoothly. It's a site around sports/events news and was getting approximately 3-10k users spread around the day. However, on match-days, it could inflate to over 40k to 100k users - all inside a three hour window. The shared hosting plan was sufficient for the normal traffic I'd get, but any time I'd have over 800-900 concurrent users, it would crash. Sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for a couple of hours. If it didn't crash, it would take about 1-3 minutes to load a single page due to the influx of traffic. Huge loss of revenue, since the three hour window per match-day (there's usually 5-8 matches per month) is when I'd make the majority of my monthly revenue.
I switched over to a VPS and installed NGINX in front of Apache to help with server-side caching. It took a lot of work/configuration to get the right settings for my type of traffic. Especially since I'd never dealt with that side of things before; it was/is all new to me. Now the site can handle up to 10K concurrent users and it doesn't crash at all. If it does, a quick reboot of the server gets it back in working order. Not only did it help with the traffic, but also with my technical SEO as Google gave me a bit of a boost after I had everything set up properly.
Professionally, migrating an e-commerce site from one hosting to another, all whilst changing the content/design/urls, essentially revamping the website in its entirety whilst trying to keep the minimal amount of link juice it had. It wouldn't have been such a cumbersome task if I wasn't working for a boss who hasn't got a clue.
Mark_A
1:41 pm on Oct 8, 2019 (gmt 0)
When I have had to do graphic design when creating home pages or templates I have found that very tiresome.
I did get better at it over the years but it remained the aspect that pained me most about building sites.
Essex_boy
3:11 pm on Oct 10, 2019 (gmt 0)
Trying to explain to an 'admin' also an 'IT manager' how encryption is created and defeated.
Just couldn't understand.
JorgeV
4:35 pm on Oct 10, 2019 (gmt 0)
Hello-
Getting up in the morning? :)
What do you mean by getting up? Morning is usually when I go to bed, after 15-16 hours of work on my sites :)
Making the transition to responsive was my hurdle.
That was also a very-long process in my case, but not a "pain", it was interesting, and made me realize how low my knowledge was. I thought I've been mastering HTML and web design, but after all, I realized that I knew barely nothing and discovered an endless ocean of possibilities. So this was a thrilling experience.
tangor
9:33 pm on Oct 10, 2019 (gmt 0)
I code until 3-4 am, take a nap until 7:30am and start all over. I catch up on my sleep Sunday afternoons --- to Monday at 7:30am! :)
My hurdle was dumping table layouts (which still continue to work perfectly fine ... just SO semantically incorrect!), but once the decision was made no worries ... other than changing page layouts for a BUNNNCCCHHHH of pages. (whew!)
That said, I sold my company a few years back and am back to "one man shop" just to keep my hand in the game ... so there's a lot of "goof off" during the day (household stuff, riding bikes, doing lunches with folks, etc.) And learning NEW stuff along the way. So ... when I get really involved and code into the wee hours of the morning, my most painful (as noted above) is getting up at the same time each morning.
YMMV!
cnvi
4:21 pm on Oct 17, 2019 (gmt 0)
Getting up in the morning and having to deal with Google yet again. We have no other choice but to deal with them because they control access to the web and yet its like playing whack-a-mole. Exhausting.
The end user who uses Google on a daily basis sings its praises "just Google it!" when they don't realize us webmasters/website operators are being manipulated and toyed with every waking hour of the day. Makes me wonder how many webmasters are on psychiatric drugs in order to deal with the stress of Google..
As "build your own website in a few mins" products increase, our jobs are in jeopardy.
Sure there is still the gal out there with a brilliant idea that could go on any ecommerce platform - but then it happens, the fear of Google kicks in and she realizes pretty damn fast traffic is going to be a challenge, if not impossible. It's a discussion I have weekly with potential new clients. If I spin the conversation into "just follow the E.A.T. guidelines", many say they don't have the budget for it. When they say they just want to spend a few bucks on advertising, I'm left with the gut wrenching decision to tell them not to waste their $ or go for it.
Lack of government oversight in the US. They should stop bickering about politics and fix the damn web already. As long as IP's can be spoofed, its gonna get a helluva lot worse before it gets better.
And the biggest challenge: price changes. The ecommerce platform one client is on makes price changes difficult. They do not have an automated tool for it and its very difficult to do in excel due to the complexities of how the databases talk to each other. Client says "raise X manufacturer" by 5%.. my reply "sure no problem" when then it takes about 30 hours to update prices for 50 items. Change to an ecommerce provider to one that has an effective price change tool? sure, if the client had the budget..
Being a webmaster used to be exciting.. fun to be working on the once new WWW.. and the design elements are still enjoyable. But the potential new clients who are genuinely scared of Google make this an ever increasing challenge and here in the US, no one is paying any attention.
cnvi
4:38 pm on Oct 25, 2019 (gmt 0)
Explained E.A.T. to a potential new customer with a fantastic idea and within a millisecond, her eyes glazed over. I explained I could point her to a half dozen fantastic copy/video producers and her response, "I'll just go with squarespace". She thinks changing to her prefered platform is going to get her traffic. Maybe in 5-10 yrs from now but not anytime soon..
