The Origin Story of Every Bad UI

Description

This is a two-panel meme that humorously links parental choices to future software quality. The top panel features a stock photo of a pregnant woman holding a glass of red wine and a cigarette, with the caption, 'No it doesn't affect my baby'. The bottom panel, labeled '20 years later:', shows a screenshot of a dropdown menu for selecting a month on a web form. The list of months is completely jumbled and not in chronological or alphabetical order (e.g., April, August, December, February). The joke implies that the child grew up to be the developer who implemented this horrifically bad user interface element. For experienced developers, an unsorted list of months is a classic sign of lazy, careless programming and a complete disregard for user experience, making it a perfect punchline for the setup

Common Tags

Frontend FrontendPainPoints UXFailures BugsInSoftware CodingMistakes DeveloperHumor

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick You call it a bug, I call it O(1) month selection. The user just has to learn the hash function

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

You call it a bug, I call it O(1) month selection. The user just has to learn the hash function
Anonymous

Twenty years later you can spot the kid: they populate the month dropdown with `SELECT DISTINCT name FROM months ORDER BY name` - apparently prenatal Cabernet disables the part of the brain that knows about ENUMs and integer sorting
Anonymous

This is what happens when you let the intern implement date sorting using a custom comparator function they found on Stack Overflow that was actually for sorting Pokemon by their Pokedex number in a different regional variant
Anonymous

This is what happens when you sort dates as strings instead of proper date objects - 20 years of technical debt compounding into a dropdown that makes users question their own sanity. The 'NA' option nestled between May and November is the chef's kiss of someone who said 'we'll refactor this later' in 2003. It's the software equivalent of that TODO comment from the original developer who's now a CTO at a different company, blissfully unaware their quick fix is still haunting production forms and making UX designers weep into their Figma files
Anonymous

You can tell Month is VARCHAR: lexicographic order, ‘NA’ promoted to the 13th month, and the placeholder persisted - turns out calendars are easier than null semantics
Anonymous

Mom's merlot hardcoded the null month - 20 years later, still failing required field validation
Anonymous

Nothing says enterprise like a required month field whose domain is ['No Selection', 'NA', 'April'…], sorted by the order tickets were filed
Deleted Account 5y

how does No Selection get to go at the top???
1. @Agent1378 5y
  
  Framework added it😄
@JoseAngelSanchez 5y

maybe default value?
Deleted Account 5y

what's wrong with being born in December?
@JoseAngelSanchez 5y

you are the smaller of your classroom...
1. @ImJmik 5y
  
  No, im the oldest one😎
  
  @JoseAngelSanchez 5y
  
  are you the teacher? 😂 (btw, I wanted to mean that… 🤦‍♂️)
@nuntikov 5y

This shit gave me a headache
@deerspangle 5y

Is this better or worse than zero indexing months?
@dosboxd 5y

Astrology was created for this form
Max Ting 5y

Aaaa
Max Ting 5y

Its sorted
1. @yaviyavi 5y
  
  the joke just leaves the group
Max Ting 5y

Got it
1. Deleted Account 5y
  
  @devs_chat
Max Ting 5y

Spasibo brat
1. Deleted Account 5y
  
  ?
2. @iftryalexg 5y
  
  Zhmu ruku, drugoi brat
Max Ting 5y

Thank you
@GaraPishun 5y

The problem is NA and No Selection... Both are same...

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The Origin Story of Every Bad UI

Description

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