Google Code: Ugliness is not just skin deep
I had previously ranted about google code from the perspective of a user. Turns out, users have it easy compared to project owners/administrators. Google code is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst online application I have ever seen from Google. It isn’t just bad by Google standards, it’s bad by any standard. In any sane company, the people responsible for delivering such an abysmal product would be taken out back and shot in the face, just to save humanity from the risk of them ever doing anything again.
Where does one start? Lets look at the cool new downloads feature they added once they realised how useless their shitty little python jizz is. So hosted projects can now offer downloads to users, all is good and well. These downloads however come with some interesting restrictions.
For example, if you want to update a download, you can’t. Fair enough, you’d delete it and then upload a new version, we can live with that. Oh wait, except you can’t do that either. You know why? Because there’s no delete functionality. That’s right, no delete functionality. So if you accidentally uploaded ‘Sistas Fucking ApacheCocksuckersUpTheAss With BigBlackDildos-DivX-preview.avi’ (and it has to be preview I’m afraid, given the 20mb uploade size limit and the 100mb cap on your file space), you’re basically, well, fucked.
You’re not just fucked in the lost storage space wtf do I do now you cunts, but you’re actually fucked in the oh shit now everyone knows that I like seeing pot bellied hairy apache fucks taking it up the ass from muscled black women sense. See. not only is it not possible to delete uploads, it’s also not possible to archive them from end users. Anyone could just choose to see ‘deprecated’ downloads, which is about as ‘hidden’ as you can make things.
This dovetails nicely into the clusterfuck that is download tagging. The administrative menu is, to put it as kindly as possible, whimsical. Menu items and options are scattered about like goat pebbleturds on a mountain. The only option under ‘Advanced’ is ‘Delete this project’. How is that advanced functionality? If you go to administer (as an aside, what English language guru decided to choose a verb for a menu item when all the others are nouns?) then downloads, you’re presented with what amounts to gibberish.
I kid you not, you are shown a list of tags, and at the bottom, it says ‘Each download may have at most one label with each of these prefixes:’. What prefixes? What downloads? What the fuck are these labels for and what do I do with them? Maybe I’m particularly retarded, but I honestly have tried very hard to decipher this page, and still have no idea what the purpose of it is, or what I can achieve by using it. The wiki and other admin pages also have this cryptic tagging mechanism, which clearly requires someone far more qualified than mere project admins to decipher.
Google code’s project hosting can be a poster child for anyone who ever wanted to justify assigning a project manager to a project. It’s a clear example of the inmates running the asylum, where the developers spent all their time on useless shit that happened to sexually gratify their sick sick fetishes, which happened to basically shit all over real users from a great great height. Who gives a flying fuck about your clever svn backend? Your UI still looks like ass, and I still have no extra features over any other shithead who gives me svn access. The webapp behaves in a way that one would expect 1998 era webapps to behave. The validation is childish and immature, and is easy to con into allowing you to enter invalid project values. Google is lucky that it’s such a useless and trivial app that it hasn’t been noticed by more malicious people, but I can honestly say that I dont know of any company where any application, internal or external, can be so shit and remain so shit for so long without anyone trying to fix it. Delivering a rushed project with many bugs and missing features is one thing, remaining that state a year on is a level of incompetence and idiocy that’s usually unacceptable in the real world. Those poor fuckers wouldn’t last a day if they had a real job in a real company.
June 19th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
I laughed very loud at this.
June 19th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Otherwise, spot on criticism.
June 19th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Hmm. Stripped my image:
http://img508.imageshack.us/my.php?image=deletedownloadszq2.png
June 19th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
“Menu items and options are scattered about like goat pebbleturds on a mountain.”
Holyshit. That is one of the funniest fucking things I’ve ever read.
June 19th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
“It isn’t just bad by Google standards, it’s bad by any standard.”
Do you really think Google’s standards are higher than most software companies? I mean, search, gmail, and maps are pretty cool, but what else? Google reader? Froogle? Google checkout?
June 19th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Good to see we didn’t have to wait for another JavaOne for more reading material… :-)
June 19th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
SourceForge anyone? java.net? JavaForge?
June 19th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
“Delivering a rushed project with many bugs and missing features is one thing, remaining that state a year on is a level of incompetence and idiocy that’s usually unacceptable in the real world. Those poor fuckers wouldn’t last a day if they had a real job in a real company.”
So if you don’t have the instinct, or can’t follow it anymore for various reasons, to find this “real world” with the “real company”, leaving behind all the shit code that is beneath you to work on for some other loser, you have to develop skills for being surrounded by incompetence.
So why don’t you fix it motherfucker instead of just criticize?
June 19th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
“So why don’t you fix it motherfucker instead of just criticize?”
I’m not sure whether the author has the capacity to fix google’s code hosting, but it does seem fundamentally flawed to me.
The who concept seems to be centered around the implementation of a subversion repository. And, IMO, that’s the biggest flaw. Google’s business is built on distributed tools, and this service they provide to users is based on a centralized revision control system. They had an opportunity to differentiate, but so far it’s just, “dude, check out our svn repository.” I don’t believe that subversion (or any other centralized revision control tool) is appropriate for open source projects.
June 19th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Well :)
I like google code, and download delete is available (you are wrong) even if that functionality is hidden enough to make dumb guys impossible to find it.
Click on “Summary + Labels” then from the download details, you go on the toolbar (under the tabs) and find the delete.
Pros:
You get free svn access over ssl, so that, you can easily make some commits behind damn company firewalls.
Text areas, to define custom labels, are innovative. How many idiot analyst would have a table for every fucking select control in a webapp? store it in a textarea, and let people to input freely (select become comboboxes)
Cons:
I got technical errors while using the wiki.
Simple no-frills issue management. (even if more control over posts could be nice to have)
I would just suggest google to provide free JSP+Servlet hosting. And some CI platform too.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
“Who gives a flying fuck about your clever svn backend?”
I don’t know how clever it is; I do know how slow it is!! sometimes I have to try 2 or 3 times before I can get a mere 3 files change set up to google code…
June 19th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
“Menu items and options are scattered about like goat pebbleturds on a mountain.”
This is probably one of the most clever lines of all time.
June 20th, 2007 at 8:35 am
This space is funny. SourceForge is only ‘the best’ because the alternatives are so, so much worse. It’s like nobody in this space has any idea how to build web application that’s actually pleasing to use.
Google Code is awkward (more so than I realized). dev.java.net is pretty fugly as well. Codehaus just integrates good products from elsewhere, possibly a better approach, but not quite the same.
June 21st, 2007 at 12:09 pm
What does Bob Lee think about this?
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:11 am
“Do you really think Google’s standards are higher than most software companies? I mean, search, gmail, and maps are pretty cool, but what else? Google reader? Froogle? Google checkout?”
Totally agree! Even with maps they bought it from another company so really the only good thing google has developed (that i use anyway) is search and gmail. Thats again because the rest are just crap.
June 25th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
How about they just give us a hosted copy of TRAC. That would blow google-code away but damn, none of their “apps” “engineers” would have anything to do I guess. Just a minimal amount of work to integrate it with groups and wah-lah, you have the one thing that trac is missing, a decent forum. Oh, but it’s only one level. Oh well, that’s g-groups, suck it up.
June 27th, 2007 at 5:26 am
HAHAHA HAHAHA
June 27th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Grendel is mistaken, the fuss about Gmail is not in its usability, the way it is not in the open standards they preached and crippled at the same time. The fuss was about storage and it was well maintained because Google has the marketing tools to maintain it. How can you call accessible a thing that has commands as regular HTML drop-downs, regular HTML links, and a DHTML/Javascript dropdown? Some commands have Undo, mostly they don’t, which is bad, because you have the Mac OS paradigm, one-click commands instead of one-click-plus-mandatory-OK-button two-clicks way of doing things, so when you click the wrong thing, there you go, your emails are gone, (e.g. Delete all supposed spam), and only CIA has the backup copy.
June 30th, 2007 at 1:19 am
You’re just trying not to come off as a google-fetisjist (after your falling in love with guice), so you bile their most irrelevant product.
July 18th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Actually, Hani’s best line was when someone threatened to beat him up by proxy at Java One a couple of years ago.
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:45 am
I can’t seem to be able to download Sistas Fucking ApacheCocksuckersUpTheAss With BigBlackDildos-DivX-preview.avi. Please help.
November 20th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
You can’t change the software licence either… I recently relicenced Docvert from LGPL to GPLv3 and there’s no way to change that in Google Code. Bah!
March 28th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
““Menu items and options are scattered about like goat pebbleturds on a mountain.”
Holyshit. That is one of the funniest fucking things I’ve ever read.”
Can’t stop laughing!!!! OMFG - this must be the comparison of the year