I've gotten quite a bit of feedback on my Bad Client story and the underlying theme has been "why the heck did you hang in so long?". There were a couple of reasons:

  1. I'm stubborn af. That was definitely a part of it.
  2. Learning Matters.

Point 2, learning is what I want to focus on here. What I have always found, for myself, for computer related things is that my learning is dramatically better when it is real. As an example, that bad client project forced me down the JavaScript rabbit hole longer and more successfully than I have ever gone before. In fact, that's one of the reasons I went with that gig – I knew it would be JavaScript heavy.

And, you know what, today I added JavaScript ajax calls to the new cut of JobHound and now, you can paste in a JobUrl and:

  1. The right JavaScript is called automatically as you move out of the field.
  2. An end point is called which parses the job and extracts out Title, Description, Location, etc.
  3. That information is stored in the database.

Yes I realize that, by 2022 standards, this is no big deal for a lot of developers– but, historically, this was always where I was weakest (one of the strongest skills a developer has is the self insight here they are weak). And, thanks to an awful client experience, I'm now better at JavaScript and Job Hound is benefiting from it.

Moral of the story: Bad clients suck but you can still benefit from them.