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Discussion on: Senior front end dev here, ask me anything!

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jhechtf profile image
Jim Burbridge

What is your Front End horror story?

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kendalmintcode profile image
Rob Kendal {{☕}}

Ooo horror story...I don't know how 'horrific' this is, but it certainly concerned me when I started at a very large organisation as a front end dev....

We had a website. The main website of the organisation that was responsible for everything from information to sales and marketing, the whole shebang really. It had 10's of millions of visits each year, and easily had between 1-2K of active people on the site at any given time.

How was this updated, you ask?

By manually running a Gulp task on someone's local machine to build the theme files, then MANUALLY (!!) uploading any changes over plain, vanilla FTP (using Filezilla) to the webserver. No unit tests, no decent form of manual testing available (because it ran on a complex and billion year old legacy CMS monstrosity), just copied over and clicking 'yes please, overwrite these files'...

I mean, it's not as bad as Hitler, but terrifying nonetheless...