Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I've just realised that whenever i want to go on Google Analytics I've just been typing anal and hitting enter 😅

Google Analytics be like...

Yay. Someone was on my website

Throughout the day I check Google analytics, I do it so much that I have a habit of typing "anal" and hitting enter into chrome and it auto completes,
I accidentally typed it not realising I still had focus on my company Slack chat window. The delete message feature is disabled 😰.

I don't use Google/Facebook for privacy reasons (and their sub-services etc). Haven't used them for ages but noticed that google still loads a lot of domains like analytics etc. This goes for facebook as well.

I now blocked a lot of google/facebook domains through my hosts file.

It's funny to see the amount of DNS requests to those fb/google connected domains nearly go to zero and also the fact that I literally can't load google/facebook anymore!

Some companies be like-

.. In job posting - We are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

..in Introduction - We are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

.. in Interviews - We are the next big thing. We are already changing the industry. Think of us like Google / Facebook etc...

.. during Interviews - Our interview process is rigorous because we are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

.. questions in interviews - Since we are Google / Facebook, please answer questions on Java, C/C++, JS, react, angular, data structure, html, css, C#, algorithms, rdbms, nosql, python, golang, pascal, shell, perl...
.. english, french, japanese, arabic, farsi, Sinhalese..
.. analytics, BigData, Hadoop, Spark,
.. HTTP(s), tcp, smpp, networking,.

..

..

..

.. starwars, dark-knight, scarface, someShitMovie..

You must be willing to work anytime. You must have 'no-excuses' attitude

.........................................

Now in Salary - Oh... well... yeah... see.... that actually depends on your previous package. Stocks will be given after 24 re-births. Joining bonus will be given once you lease your kidneys.

But hey, look... We got free food.

Well, SHOVE THAT FOOD UPTO YOUR ASS.

FUCK YOU...
FUCK YOUR 'COOL aka STUPID PIZZA BEER - CULTURE'.
FUCK YOUR 'FLAT- HIERARCHY'.
FUCK YOUR REVOLUTIONARY-PRODUCT.

FUCK YOU!

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

Published my app and now watching Google analytics as if it's the world cup .
Cheering for the users as they go from screen to screen ,📣
And when they checkout .. feel like we scored ⚽ !

Just checked my Google Analytics, WTF?

How I feel using Google Analytics Realtime to watch a user navigate my site.

Client: Google analytics is saying our bounce rate is 86%, Could you fix what you did to improve this?

It's a single page website -.-

Google: You need a fast website to rank well.
Me: Ok, so why does your Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Optimize code drag my site down to the seventh circle of Hell in performance?
Google: You need a fast website to rank well.
Me: ...

I'm so sick of all these fat frontend websites.

Transferring dozens of megabytes of mostly unused libraries is not acceptable.

A browser tab crunching up CPU time because everything must be "beautifully animated" (🤢) and processed without involving page reloads/backend is not acceptable.

A response time of over a second is not acceptable.

Cryptic error messages and random popups asking you to reload your page, not acceptable.

Sticky elements/popups breaking access on small screens is not acceptable.

Running hundreds of ajax calls per minute as heartbeats/probes
and crashing the page when the internet has a hiccup, not acceptable.

Fuck Asana, Fuck Twitch, Fuck LinkedIn, Fuck Youtube, Fuck the dozens of other SPAs which unload their truckload of diarrhea into a tab, yet fail to load crucial functionality about half of the time.

Fuck any page that breaks when you block Facebook, Doubleclick, Twitter or Google Analytics. To hell with websites depending on cookies or javascript loaders to display anything.

I want webpages to be interactive informational documents again.

Fuck off with your apps.

If you want to make an app, learn to use a real language, and get the fuck out of my browser.

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

Just managed to setup a tiny/simple privacy-friendly analytics system.

You basically call an api from your backend with the api key and all the headers you received from the browser (php and Apache or nginx in my case) and the analytics api gets useful stuff out of that data without sacrificing privacy.

I get a little bit more insight into my websites usage and the client isn't sacrificing identifiable information!

I've been wanting to make this fucker for fucking months.

We used to use Trello for our team boards and was starting to transition to Gitlab's issues for better code integration...

I became aware that my boss was being "demanded" to have a better analytics of our team performance so I started digging more insightful issue/tasks software like YouTrack ( Jetbrains ) and Jira ( Atlasian ).

After 2 months of trial and learning I suggested we go with YouTrack.

"We" are now using it for about 6 months already and it is a fucking mess.

My peers have no clue how to scrum, even after my efforts to teach them and they even spent a fucking 3 days workshop about it on fucking Google (!?!?) without me ( there is a rant about it ).

My boss is a nice person but the dude lacks any trace of competence to manage anyone other than him.

I'm tired of babysitting a man that is 10 years older than me and has a car that costs almost 10x mine.

I'm two days back from vacation and I almost rage quited 5 times.

Client (big company selling luxury vehicles):
- "We need to replace analytics system on our website"
- "Since it is almost useless"
- "Our company deserve something better, google analytics is not simply enough"
- "Can you program it for us?"
- "We have already arranged budget for that project"
- "Like 200 euros, that must be enough"

Lol

Worst dev experience….

Forgetting to use a private browser tab to look at porn….

Take my laptop to work the next day because the bosses want a rundown on seo and trends of the site….

Go to google type “ana…” hoping for the autocomplete of “analytics”, but no. I got “busty anal POV”….

On a 50” 4K screen, they all saw my auto-complete……

I say it with all of my heart:
FUCK YOU google analytics spammers!

"we use cookies to give you a better experience on our site"

A better experience? Really?

It looks like you're using more than 100 external parties for whatever fucking reason. It is nearly impossible to disallow these, except for some stuff like analytics, which I don't like since it includes mass surveillance parties like Google and Facebook, but I'd at least, to some extent, understand that better.
But, the amount of dark pattern here is staggering and this kind of 'consent' you're using wouldn't, in a million years, hold up under the GDPR.

You know what would be a better experience? No tracking and no ads.

Go fuck your better experience (would that be a better sex experience....?)

And you thought your markdown based Wiki was going to change the company...

Received a call from client complaining about stupidity of google analytics. He could not get pass Terms and Conditions page. Saying "I agree" button is faded away and can not be clicked.

He just needed to scroll the page down.

What happened to people nowdays?

Watching Google Analytics for my company's customer facing tools.

Almost half our traffic is made up of IE and Edge.

In that IE group, somewhere, there is a sad strange little user still on IE 8. Just one.

Poor guy.....

Does anyone know of any open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

(Warning: kinda long && somewhat of a political rant)

Every time I tell someone I work with AI, the first thing to come out of their mouth is "oh but AI is going to take over the world!"

No.

It was only somewhat recently that it started being able to recognize what was in a picture from over 3 million images, and that too it's not that great at. Honestly people always say "AI is just if-else" ironically, but it isn't really that far from the truth, we just multiply an input by weights and check the output.

It isn't some magical sauce, it's not being born and then exploring a problem, it's just glorified-probability prediction. Even in "unsupervised" learning, the domain set is provided; in "reinforcement learning" which has gotten super popular lately we just have the computer decide which policy is optimal and apply that to an environment. It's a glorified decision tree (and technically tree models like XGBoost outperform neural networks and deep learning on a large number of problems) and it isn't going to "decide" to take over the planet.

Honestly all of this is just born out of Elon Musk fans who take his word as truth and have been led to believe that AI is going to take over the world. There are a billion reasons why it can't! And to top it off this takes away a lot of public attention from VERY concerning ethical issues with AI.

Am I the only one who saw Google Duplex being unveiled and immediately thought "fraud"? Forget phone scammers, if you trained duplex on the mannerisms of, for example, a famous politician's voice, you could impersonate them in an audio clip (or even video clip with deepfakes). Or for example the widespread use of object detection and facial recognition in surveillance systems deployed by DoD. Or the use of AI combined with location tracking and browsing analytics for targeted marketing.

The list of ethics breaches are endless, and I find it super suspicious that those profiting the most off of unethical AI are all too eager to shift public concern to some science fiction Terminator style takeover that, if ever possible, would be a long way out and is not any sort of a priority issue right now.

Just wow. I had a fellow developer tell me to drop support for Google Chrome. I hate to break it to you but roughly 70% of our user base uses Google Chrome (Google Analytics proves this). Like seriously!

The moment you realize, you are not getting your own website's Google Analytics information because of your Ghostry and Ad block plus installed :|

It hurts 10 folds when you spend 8 hours in debugging and on SO before epiphany ://

Karma is a Bitch :|

Google be like

Interesting languages...

Title: Google can track your porn history, even in incognito mode

Body(tl;dr version): Pornsites use Google Analytics

You little idiotic motherfucking tech savvy wannabe, most of the websites use some form of user tracking services.

Hell, even the blog/news website you work for probably does.

I feel I should open a github repo, for people to contribute privacy policy parts into, have say folders like "google analytics" and then whenever people encounter those in the wild, add examples there, so people could fetch together a full privacy policy for free, as all those new cashgrab websites are just fucking insane. But I am not really sure, if that would find any contributors tbh sadly.

P.S: I seem to have developed now a third sense, when the devrant post cooldown is down, so I can rant more lol, because whenever I feel like posting the thought or rant, the cooldown is just about to expire

!rant
Just discovered Piwik , it's an open source alternative to Google analytics, and it's awesome!

Alright... how the FUCK is an IP address considered personal data by GDPR????

Fucking boomers don't even know what an IP is. Guess what, every website you've ever been to has your IP! It's in your router, your fucking ISP's registry, and in every DNS server within 1000 miles of you!

Imagine thinking your IP gives up private information, god, just fuck me, I hate all of it, idiotic fools fumbling around with shit they don't understand.

...WKO making every developer's life a living nightmare because fucking GOOGLE FONTS stores a copy of your IP for their stupid analytics. You know what? Just don't use the internet either, that needs your IP too. In fact, don't pay taxes either, the tax office has a copy of your address, that's pretty personal information if you ask me! Just live in the woods and survive with the wolves.

I already know the future 'resolution' to this one - store fonts locally, resolve this dangerous "issue"... "waaaahhh fullStackClown! the site is slower now!!!"

...an infinite circle of clownshipness continues...

tune in next week as the world continues to approach it's circus fate!

Alright! I was getting familiar with Google Analytics!

*visits Google Analytics again*
*the entire fucking thing is redesigned for the nth time*

So I'm at that age of arranged marriage process. It's kinda like dating but even more complicated with more if conditions on religion, caste, region, age and impressions of a third person who may be a mutual relative or acquaintance. And yeah, you have to engage or marry before any kind of intimacy.

Finding a girl of same religion, caste and region is hard enough, ( not a matter for me personally, but it's a factor for families to go along ). I was lucky enough to find this pretty nice girl that seems be the best match I have received in the matrimony site so far.

She's also a programmer which is awesome and together we could also explore the earth as a Digital Nomad if she's also into that.

Here's the deal though, my father is not very keen on next steps in making this partnership ( guys parent calling girls family to know things better ) because apparently she did higher education abroad and works abroad, and I'm not that qualified in terms of education. And on top of that, he worries I'll move abroad leaving everything back at home.

I suppose that's his insecurity showing up.

He doesn't realize working in IT is the most flexible job as proved in 2020 and it's only going to get better in the coming years. We could work from anywhere with the right remote company.

Anyhow, the girl's family found out my number and reached out to me directly. I'm pretty impressed honestly.

I had left little traces on the internet for potential families to find more info about me if they choose to look me up! This was in a way a little filter of my own. Thanks to Google Analytics and Seach Console for helping me to track them XD

I just hope this works out and my father won't mess up my chance for me to get to know this girl better and potentially be with the life partner I dreamed of.

If this won't work out, I'm just gonna live alone rest of my life. The criterias and conditions set by boomers for arranged marriage are very disgusting for my modern mindset.

Added a new feature. Saw no traffic. Removed it thinking no one liked it. Receive a bunch of angry emails.

I forgot to tag shit properly. FML.

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

Currently using Matomo instead of Google Analytics.
Definitely a good alternative!

Especially if you don't want a big company to track YOUR users.

I have setup site wide Google analytics events since June and the product manager only ever looks at the pageviews. I don't think he understand what a funnel even is.

Each day I hear about him wanting to increase the customers to come on our site and then do nothing about it. At least LOOK AT THE DATA

(this isn't my first rant. I had to delete the other account because it is easy to find me by the other username)

Was going through my Google analytics. Wtf Trump?

That moment when your online competition reaches an almost godlike plane of existence as SEO strategists by placing the literal google analytics code in the literal head of the website. Organic traffic through the roof.

A client asked me to include a GA tracking code into her website,

I said yea I'll add it for you, just send me the code snippet please :)

she sent me the URL to google analytics login page....

I told her that I need the code snippet not the URL.

She replied: yah that's what I sent.

Me:...

It hurts if you see this on Google Analytics for a Windows 10 UWP app!!
Google, I know you hate MS. Why do you have to show it on me??!!😢😢

To everyone freaking out about how bad Microsoft buying GitHub would be for "privacy". I want you to know that GitHub already uses Google and Facebook analytics on their site.

When you're not getting a 100/100 score on page speed insights, because google analytics script is not leveraging browser cache... (ironically)

So I just used Google analytics data from my sites to reverse stalk someone who google stalked me today. I got a whole bunch of information including their mobile model, their city and bunch of other data to confirm they did actually stalk me and understand their psychology.

Backstory: I had deactivated my instagram a couple of weeks ago account without any notice. It was the best decision I made this year. I feel more focused and found myself with plenty of time which otherwise I would have spend on lusting over those sexy ig girls.

Thought nobody would even notice or care. But apparently this one girl, my 2020 covid long distance lover whom I haven't talked to in over 8 months noticed it and decided to Google me.

She spent over 25 mins on my main site and also somehow managed to discover my dead travel blog from Google. I was thinking that I did a good job with the pseudonym I used for the travel blog. Apparently that's not the case!

She must've then proceeded to my linkedin account listed on the site and then sent me a connection request. That was then the notification popped up in my phone earlier today and made me feel butterflies in my stomach. I hadn't felt those butterfly feeling ever since I figured out that we can't be together or possibly even meet for once in real life.

I was curious how she found my linkedin and why sent me the request. We are not even in a related work field, same country. I never thought I'd be thinking more than 5 secs over a linkedin connection request.

That's what lead me to check out the Google analytics data to find the chronology of the events that lead to this connection request.

Anyways, it warmed my heart to learn that she still remembers me after all these months and that she bothered to Google me. Maybe she worried if I blocked her in ig? Or maybe she wondered if I lost my life in the recent covid wave?..

I wanted her to think that I was dead by not responding to the linkedin connection request. But it is possible that she checked out my GitHub profile and found my recent activities.

It fucking sucks knowing that I might never meet her in real life. If we meet, I worry it will lead us to doing things that might hurt others.

I guess at least I can die knowing that there was some truth in our love and someone cared about me and that it was not some illusion I felt..

Maybe the least I can do for her is to just accept that connection request.

So hyped cause my side project had +20% traffic last week !!!!

Turns out it was all coming from 'Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!'

Google Analytics how easily are you fooled ?

Jesus fucking christ Google Analytics sucks major fucking donkey dick.

Peace

I can literally remember back in January 2015 when android studio was a fat piece of slow SHIT and to boot up an emulator it took me 5-20 minutes. Gradle build took 1-2 minutes. I was dying.

Now 4 years later in 2019, it still might be fat but godfckindamn it is fast. Emulator boots up in 2-4 seconds. Gradle finishes in no more than 6 seconds. Hierarchy opens up in less than a second. Performance statistics and analytics no longer lag or have latency.

Google has finally done a great fckin job fck u thnx

Boss: “Our ecommerce conversions in Google Analytics are less than the actual pace of orders.”

Me: “Nothing has changed in the tracking code or setup. It must be our goals setup which you have to have a Ph.D. to understand, plus whatever mood Google’s algorithms are in today.”

He’s not mad at me. We’re both just confused why Google AdWords, Analytics, and Tag Manager have to be so damn hard to get right. I’ve never been able to do it right. And most data is thrown out because people browse websites while logged into their Google Account, which makes their clickstream disappear and become unattributable because of understandable privacy policies. I don’t want my data tracked when I’m logged in either!

So now we have had to hire specialists at several thousand dollars per month to figure this out.

PM keeps asking me for a report on page hits. I've given him page hits, page views, page visits and his reply is always the same...

"No, this means nothing to me. I want page hits/visits. Google analytics!"

I'm like O_o ...

So, a few weeks ago I was asked by a client to add a cookie consent popup.

Specifically the site must not track the user via Google analytics until they consent.

All fine and I added the normal popup bar at the top the screen.

The client asked me make this smaller and place it into the bottom right hand corner, as to not "scare visitors". After some design hanged on his end the message ending up being 80px side. I.e. tiny.

Weeks later the client is now moaning about decreased traffic levels in analytics.

This is to be expected as cookie message can barely been seen.

Facepalm.

Just discovered these hits on GA for one of my sites. WTF?

Hey uh Google... Can you f*ck off with this bs?

Delivered a website to a client, pagespeed results 99 on both mobile and desktop (just 1 minus point for implementing Google analytics- since it has a too low caching time). Client insists on having a 100 pagespeed result even it doesn't change real pagespeed ... -.-

So.. Google Analytics is not working..

Again..

Salespeople telling clients "Your site doesn't need a privacy policy/cookie policy since you don't actually sell anything on your site."

Wrong wrong wrong WRONGITY WRONG WROOONNGGGG!!!!!

Client to PM to me: "Well Jim said we don't need those on this site."

Me: "Well Jim is misinformed, since we use Google analytics, Facebook Pixel, and contact forms, you need to have both a privacy and cookie policy."

PM to client: "We'll find you a template you can use to get started, it'll cover most of what you need."

Me to PM: "we will do no such thing, we can send them a few links explaining why they need these, but they should consult a legal professional and cover their asses for their own business practices. I can provide any technical details they may need like what data the cookies collect if necessary."

PM to me: "well I'll just find something for them then."

*In my head* please just go crawl in a hole and die.

How do you guys monitor website traffic?

I was looking of a solution for a long while. Google analytics sucks these days. In the beginning it was an awesome system! Long, I've searched an alternative that was LIGHTWEIGT. That last part was the issue. What the fuck do people with their software? Finally, I've found umami. It's amazing. It shows even the city name from visitors and it shows a nice world map including statistics. Browsers used / desktop / laptop / phone / OS. It also shows debounce ratio (amount of people that run directly away after visit) and users currently online. It's all I could've ever wished for. Using it since yesterday and it's so decent and fast!

It's one of those products that makes me think "This is how I would've written it myself too". Happens sometimes. Same for gitea / cogs. Also such perfect products. There's still hope.

When...
- you start the day with good intentions.
- you want to fix some long-due issue
- you think: I'll google it and I'll solve it. What can it be? I just want to track correctly my subdomains with all-mighty Google Analytics

and the first answer you find is:
"Unfortunately, Google Analytics has a few hoops to jump ...blablabla More unfortunately, the Google Analytics documentation is unclear ...blabla"
and 20 more pages of blog.

Fuck.
Let's skip to the next good intention before the day turns bad

Fuck Google analytics .. seriously .. fuck it .. I understand it's a free tool that doesn't mean you mask your incompetency behind that banner.

Im pretty sure minecraft mods have better documentation than this POS.

I really like the user demographics data it gives , but with the asterisk on literally every other metric it gets harder to believe the ones that are functional.

I cant express exactly how many times I end up with hordes of articles that point out small caveats with this shit.

FUCK IT

Six hours of heavy debugging to find out that someone put a fucking coma instead of a fucking semicolon somewhere in the middle of a Google Analytics query.

And accidentally I found 3 other "small" bugs. Reports from the last 8 months are useless.

Why this always happen on fridays?

I work with statistics/data analysis and web development. I study these subjects for almost a decade and now I have 4 years of practical experience.

This information is on my LinkedIn profile and from time to time tech recruiters contact me wanting to have an interview. I always accept because I find it a great way to practice interviews and talking in English, as it isn't my native language.

A remark that I always make to my colleagues wanting to start doing data analysis related work is that it may seem similar to development, but it's not. When you develop, your code work or not. It may be ugly, it may be full of security problems, but you almost always have a clear indication if things are functioning. It's possible to more or less correlate experience using a programming language with knowing how to develop.

Data science is different. You have to know what you are doing because the code will run even if you are doing something totally wrong. You have to know how to interpret the results and judge if they make sense. For this the mathematics and theory behind is as important as the programming language you use.

Ok, so I go to my first interview for a data science position. Then I discover that I will be interview by... a psychologist. A particularly old one. Yeah. Great start.

She proceeds to go through the most boring checklist of questions I ever saw. The first one? "Do you know Python?". At this point I'm questioning myself why I agreed to be interviewed. A few minutes later, a super cringy one: "Can you tell me an example of your amazing analytics skills?". I then proceed to explain what I wrote in the last two paragraphs to her. At this point is clear that she has no idea of what data science is and the company probably googled what they should expect from a candidate.

20 minutes later and the interview is over. A few days later I receive an email saying that I was not selected to continue with the recruitment process because I don't have enough experience.

In summary: an old psychologist with no idea on how data science works says I don't have experience on the subject based on a checklist that they probably google. The interview lasted less than 30 minutes.

Two weeks later another company interviews me, I gave basically the same answers and they absolutely liked what they heard. Since that day I stopped trying to understand what is expected from you on interviews.

Trying to teach myself Google analytics / matomo (piwik) is the worst thing

when you look at Google analytics...

DevRant has many privacy-conscious people and honestly just people who don't like when their personally identifiable data gets shared.

Yet, DevRant uses Carbon Ads owned by BuySellAds. Here's what their privacy policy reads:

"Some Personally Identifiable Information may also be provided to intermediaries and other Third Party Service Providers (defined in part (4) below) who assist us with the Services"

You know what's the funniest thing? In "part 4 below" they never actually state which companies do they share personally identifiable information with.

Just a quick reminder that when you use DevRant, your personally identifiable information may be shared with any amount of third parties, and you could bet a lot of money that the list includes Google and Facebook because of remarketing. Remarketing is a fancy term that means not selling personal data but instead giving it away for free.

Use AdGuard or any other browser extension that blocks analytic scripts. Buy a Raspberry Pi Zero W and make yourself a PiHole. When you're using DevRant mobile app, use analytics-blocking VPN.

Is devRant using Google Analytics for upvotes (on web)? My privacy protection apps have removed the ++ button because of that on web :(

Trying to setup a fucking google tag manager to get the fucking google analytics working.

Few years ago it was a 10 minutes work. Now I'm already at 4 hours. Fucking sick

WHY I say why I have two fucking equals accounts, FUCKING THE SAME.
And one is working the other one doesn't give a shit about my analytics.

Ehi, Tag manager, I just set up a Tag called "YourMother" related with its trigger called "Fuck" using same extra variable called "anal"

Can you just show it in my anal-ytics, fucking please?

The short giggling you have with a colleague when you want to visit analytics.google.com and you start typing and hit enter after the first 4 characters, because you are convinced it's in your browser history, but apparently it's not and instead of going to analytics, it's going to search for that first 4 characters 😂

So I've been a developer at my current job for about 12 years. I am the most senior level developer at my job. Let me state that I am a backend developer although I did frontend development off and on as well for the first 5 years of my career. However I have done no major frontend development for around 7 years now.

Effectively our frontend developer of 6/7 years just left.

We had an existing project in the queue and my boss expected me to do frontend development for this project which I did just to help out, but I am not getting any extra pay for this and I absolutely hate doing it. The only thing I was paid for was I overtime for completing the project quicker. With that being said I feel like I should be paid substantially more since I am doing double work and since they are not paying for a frontend developer. I'm literally doing her job and doing a better job than she did mistake wise doing her job.

Additionally many things have changed over the past 6/7 years and they have it in their minds since I did it in the past it should be the same now which isn't the case. So there are things in my project queue right now for future projects that they think I know how to do and I don't. It isn't that I couldn't eventually figure it out. It is just that I have zero desire to learn it .I just absolutely hate styling websites.

I'm ok with doing minor frontend things for projects but not entire websites

I literally develop the backend off all the sites we build setup Google tag manger tags/triggers, Google analytics, search console, Google looker studio, dns, site updates, manage all out Linux servers, do seo for content and sites. I can't handle something else on my plate. I'm currently having to rewrite a ton of code as well due to upgrades for our sites.

How do I respectfully tell my boss I refuse to do frontend work going forward or pay me substantially more on another project and that he needs to hire someone else without damaging our relationship?

I like my boss and my coworkers as people a lot outside of work, but I feel like I'm being taken advantage of financially and I'm honestly tired of it. As a developer for 12 years I'm honestly ready to just go elsewhere.

Never seen this detailed an info on Google Analytics cookies before

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

Google Analytics has such shit documentations. They switched from some analytics.js to gtag.js, but didn't update everything in the docs, so I have to guess and find how to do things the new way. Also all the issues on StackOverflow are by marketing "specialists" who don't even understand JavaScript. And debugging any of this is near useless. You just send data into a magical data layer and hope Google does what you want. It's a fucking black-box and I've no idea why nothing works. FUCKING GOD DAMN PIECE OF SHIT, WOOOORK!

So the last couple of days I have been optimizing my site, from a Pagespeed score below 40 to 97 and I can't get further because I'm using Google Analytics, Facebook Like-button and load a couple of images from Youtube.

Why must you be like this Google 😥😥It's partly you code, so why are you punishing me 😥

Le Angular programmer

Me: I need to add all these fields across this 30 page (seriously) questionnaire to the dataLayer for Google Analytics...I'll see if I can loop over all the controls and get the native element so that I can do things with it.

Also me: WTF do you mean I don't have access to the native element? Damn it! What does Google say?

**terrible french accent**
A few moments later
**end terrible french accent**

Me: I don't want to have to create a directive to put on every single one of these fields. That's dumb. Not gonna do it...bad vanilla JavaScript?

**terrible french accent**
Several minutes later
**end terrible french accent**

Me: Wait...if we use this directive then the directive can handle all the things AND we can use it outside of this questionnaire. The rest of the app can send this data so that Google Analytics can know all the things

Man Google..You sure do know what I want before I know what I want...Are you spying on me too?

Wtf has happened to Google webmaster tools / ad(word)s / analytics? There used to be so many valuable insights before the current version, now everything is hidden in the new UI or Google just keep the info to themselves? Does anybody use Google anal/ads anymore?

My apologies, Mistaken WK177 for "Last Successful project"

Now my least Successful project:

It was in the summer of many years ago.
I created a social network site for a camp site where I used to go. People were able to upload their own profile picture and adding some text to their profile page... with google analytics I was able to see what pages were used the most:

the webpage about: the opening and closing hours of facilities

after a year we shut it down because it was not being used.

And of course facebook started getting popular.

I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.

I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)

I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:

1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company

2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)

3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth

4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.

5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.

6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.

7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .

8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.

My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?

we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.

So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?

then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?

if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.

For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.

same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS

for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .

an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".

edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"

but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product

The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad

I just tried to get support for a problem we're having getting accurate results from AdWords. Now I know why it's called Google ANALytics. With how complicated it all can be when you're trying not to overspend on AdWords, it's easy for people unfamiliar with it to get a "prison welcome".

Is there a way to implement Google analytics to a specific page.

So, my requirement is to let the user add his/her Google analytics to their page on my application. The page is in sub-route of the application (user/username)

Can I allow a user to do that? Are there any articles related to this?

Just received an email from a marketing company in the US stating that:

"Not liking cookies. Use Google analytics instead to track behavior."

And that "Cookies now losing popularity in the US".

rm -rf /

Damn you, Google Tag Manager!

What do you guys use instead of Google Analytics? I'd like a free (if possible) application that gives me most if not all of the data Google does

This partnership gives Google advertisers access to Unity’s mobile gaming network through Universal App Campaigns (UAC). This means Unity mobile app developers will be able to monetize with Google’s ads without any additional required development work.

To date, the partnership has resulted in video completion rates of 87.3% compared to the average benchmark of 32.5% (Source: Moat Analytics Benchmarks: Q4 2017). Furthermore, Unity has consistently scored 97.8% for valid and viewable rates, well above in-app benchmarks of 54.7%, providing a brand-safe environment for advertisers while also creating value for developers and gamers alike.

Alright, hear me out…
Circumventing tracking protection is sometimes okay!
Let me explain!
If user explicitly consented to tracking, why can’t I track them? They have tracking protection installed (as they should, and so do I), but when they click “Allow”, I still can’t load analytics. That’s not fair.
I will show the “Decline all” button loud and clear right next to “Allow all” and “Customize”, but I don’t want user’s adblock decide for the user. I won’t load anything until they explicitly allow me to. For all I know, they can have an adblock filter that blocks consent-seeking UI elements/popups (although mine is not a popup, I hate popups), and to me they will appear as unconsenting users. I’m fine with all of that.

But why can’t I track people who agreed that I can track them?
This is why I use my own analytics url that isn’t present in any anti-tracking blocklists.

My tracking does directly benefit both me and my users, and no one else. My users because it makes the product they pay for better at no extra cost, me because when my users are happy, I’m happy too. I want to put emphasis on “no one else” — I use self-hosted things that don’t send anything upstream. I own 100% of the data. I obviously don’t sell it, but I don’t share it either. People who say they don’t sell data all while using google analytics/meta pixel are clowns. Damn right you don’t sell data — you give it away for free. I don’t.

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)

Matomo, the free web analytics tool formerly known as Piwik, does not display referring search keywords (anymore?) without purchasing an add-on, which makes it less valuable than the good old webalizer. I should grab my old backups from 2001 and find a Perl script that crawls Apache server logs. Why must digital progress always mean Verschlimmbesserung?

> Use Search Keywords Performance to see all keywords behind 'keyword not defined'. All keywords searched by your users on Google, Bing and other search engines will be listed