Top 10 Scariest Things To Keep a Developer Awake At Night

Trick or Treat!

Halloween night can make everyone scared. Everyone except developers.
Halloween night is an endless series of noisy parties. But a real developer will prefer to keep silence and be serious.

The reason is simple. You won’t celebrate another ‘day of horror’ when you face a real nightmare during your working days all the year long. Let’s find out what are the scariest things that can make a developer thrill with horror.

Hear and tremble! HA-HA-HA-HA!

1. Another guy has been working on this code. Actually, he completely fucked up. Now it’s yours.

This situation may happen to a new developer who just joined a team as well as to a senior programmer considered ‘more experienced to fix that issues’. No one is immune to this.

The thing is that each developer has his own unique style of coding. In order to fix lengthy, unreadable code with a great amount of bugs, a new developer needs to try to walk in the shoes of the person who has written this code. This is the time when you on right earnest think that mind-reading is a really great quality.

2. That awkward moment when customer does not respond to you anymore.

Just imagine: you spend your days and nights working on the project and finally it is ready. You call your customer to tell this wonderful news. But you haven’t got any answer. You try again. Nothing. Then you finally realize that your customer is actually not going to respond to you anymore.

You will be frightened. So will be a developer or web designer.

In order to avoid this terrific situation, we advise a developer to gather as much contact information of the customer as it is possible: e-mail address, mobile phone, home number. If you are working on a freelance basis and a third-party firm doesn’t reserve your rights, then don’t forget to conclude a contract. Besides, it would be great to get a part of money for the project in advance.

3. A customer wants to host his/her website on FreeWebs.

You want me to create a website on FreeWebs or other free webhosts for you because it will save your money? You might also wish me to use WYSIWYG editor for development?

Nah, that doesn’t work that way.

In this case a web designer or a developer should explain to his employer, that in order to be taken serious, he/she should use the services of real webhost and get a proper domain name. Otherwise creating a web-site for such a client is meaningless.

4. Loss of data, no backup.

It is one of the worst nightmares a developer can face. The worst scenario happens when a developer neglected to spend his time on backing up his files because in this case he can blame only himself.

In order to avoid this real disaster a developer should remember one simple rule: don’t forget to back up your files even if you have a stable system and you are not going to spill the coffee on your laptop any time soon.

The appropriate nightmare for a web designer is to merge all the layers and save the .psd file. And THEN to get an e-mail with a long list of ‘quick remarks’.

5. Photos of low quality, usually taken from Google images.

A large number of customers enjoys taking a picture from Google images and asking a web designer to focus on it.
The thing is that the quality of such photos is low and therefore they are useless.

‘I just found this cute picture of the house of my dream in Google. Could you play with it and include somewhere in our corporate website’s home page?’.

Remember, that you should accept only those photos that were taken by a professional photographer or by a client himself.

6. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6

So, you’ve done all the development. Now you are excited to show your work to the customer. You are sending the link. And get a long list full of negative feedback. What’s wrong? Wait for it… Your customer is using IE6!

This browser really can bring around a lot of problems to a developer because of poor CSS support.

Everyone knows that the features that run smoothly on other browsers will not run the same way on Internet Explorer 6. Everyone but not you customer. It seems that some of them are still living in 2000.

7. One more change…

“This looks perfect to me. But I just thought we should change that screen a little bit.”

In 99% of cases this phrase means that you will need to re-do everything you have done before.

This is bad when the client wants to change or to add some stuff that was not agreed. In order to prevent such situation a developer or a web designer should make a contract with the detailed information on how the project should look like.

8. The Semicolon key is broken

Yep, this is your rainy day. The most popular key on your keyboard is completely broken. What could be worse?

You know what: it is even worse when the semicolon key is not completely broken but works from time to time. In this case you are doomed to spend the rest of your week in search of ‘the missing’ semicolon in your code.

9. The Internet connection is down

It is not a surprise that the Internet, and Google in particular, is an irreplaceable helper for any web designer or a developer.

The IT specialists use it in search of code samples, the solution of some especially challenging task; share their experience with the colleagues from all over the world. Without the Internet connection developers and web designers feel isolated and don’t know what to do if they face a bug they has never faced before.

It’s a real nightmare.

10. The negative reaction of the client, expressed the following way: I don’t like it, it doesn’t work for me.

Probably, this is the most favorite type of feedback for the most of the customers. Every developer and designer has faced it at least once.

Here is a quick tip: In most cases, it is enough to change some small detail and the client will be happy and contented.

A real life conversation (via phone or on Skype) will help greatly in this situation. A developer or a web designer should ask patiently why the employer is not satisfied with his work.

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Happy Halloween!