So, directly to a login page. No demo, no explanation, no features, not even a single screenshot, not even a paragraph of text of what it is about, nothing.
Maybe your product is great, maybe even fantastic, but the presentation does not convince me to sign up at all.
What I see now, and it's been like this for a while, is this:
You get the results and they do have direct URLs. But then, if you do some things with the link, e.g. right click to open it in a new tab, it swaps the URL to the indirect one. The idea is that initially you see a normal link, with a normal URL which will be displayed correctly when you hover the mouse over it, but right before you click it, it's swapped for the indirect one.
So, they have been doing stuff like this for a while and it has been somewhat fluid, because the swapping can occur on different events and I have also seen it load with all the links pre-swapped to the indirect ones, sometimes.
So, yes, what you see may be different and you may get the indirect URLs swapped at different stages.
If you don't mind me saying this, one thing that gets overlooked often in situations like the one you explained is that the team is part of the system that needs modernisation.
In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be.
From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at all so frequent. If the project is legacy, most often is because the team also is outdated.
So, obviously you can just switch jobs. And if you're getting sick from it, then you should by all means leave this job.
But then again, if what you actually want is to make this job work, then my suggestion is to:
1. Get the whole team together and evaluate their situation. Make a list of the skills the team is lacking and the knowledge updates needed. Make them participate in this so that, at the same time, you can evaluate their attitude towards the whole thing.
1.a. If the team does not want to update, then there's no successful path and I would suggest leaving.
1.b. If the team is receptive, then go ahead.
2. Meet with whoever needs to authorise it and get them to commit to providing both time and resources for re-training the team. You will need a plan, a timeline, and achievable goals.
3. Start as soon as you can. Focus first on basic infrastructure. Any tools, processes, skills, that are generic and widely applicable. Then go for more specific ones directly related to the project's technologies.
The team may need some rearranging too, but try to keep this at minimum so that they can be confident that all of this is strictly related to a technology and skill update, and will not imply any sort of job insecurity or competition.
You may have noticed that all of this is mostly people management. If this is not something you'd like to do, then the only option is leaving. The job you're in right now is clearly one of people managing and not so much a technological one -though is still requires knowing and choosing the technological goals to seek, obviously-.
If you do follow, then who knows what will happen. But if things go well, you might expect to see some results in around 6 months or so, depending on how large/small the team and project are.
I didn't want to get into this in my original post, but this is definitely part of the problem. The development team needs modernization. We have a lot of excellent developers, but these developers have spent many years developing on a tech stack of PowerBuilder, COBOL, and SQL stored procedures. API development, testing, deployment, and maintenance are not anything that they have worked with before.
Finally after months of me complaining, the management team has gotten the approval to hire one additional developer who has experience with API development. To be honest though, I am skeptical if one developer is going to change anything, and I can imagine that a lot of skilled developers won't be staying here long when they see that we don't really have the personnel in place to deliver on the vision that the management team has set.
I definitely am not a people manager (nor do I want to be again, been there done that), but I can imagine that our engineering manager is in a tough place right now too. A lot of the development team are close to retirement age and he can't really push them too much due to the fear of them leaving and taking their years or decades of domain knowledge with them.
One good developer can start a shift but only if there's absolute buy-in from management (and you) to carve out the time the rest of the team needs to get up to speed.
Since you say the current developers are also decent but otherwise inexperienced with the kind of work you expect there's a chance that with the right organisational changes and support (i.e.: allowing the experienced new developer to work more as a mentor than being responsible for deliveries right away) and given time those people could become more effective.
The issue will land squarely on the engineering management though, they need to accept the current team is not up to par for the deliveries while not making them scared for their jobs (that would just make the current developers cynical, and doing whatever they can to claw back power before retirement). It's a long road ahead that requires a very competent engineering management team to pull off.
Ah, then I'd say this is definitely not a good job for you.
I would suggest just leaving as soon as possible. I know it's hard and I know the current market is difficult, but do make a firm decision to, if not immediately, leave in a fixed time frame, say in two months or before the new year or something else but put a limit on it. Not only will that push you into doing it, but seeing a clear exit will probably help with your peace of mind.
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The banner is about the live button. It says nothing about the play button. The play button does in fact do "something", but what it does is pointless.
So, what I don't understand is what is the play button supposed to do? Also why submit this two days early if people cannot see anything until tomorrow? Come tomorrow, people will already have dismissed this as useless and forgotten about it.
My cat is smarter than you.... he knows what the play button does "today" at the right time and why he announce it days before... curious why nasa says us days before the eclipse too.....
The Live button (js/app.js:486-493) ticks every second (setInterval(liveTick 1000))
During the eclipse window (16:00–20:00 UT on 12 Aug 2026) it computes the current UTC time sets the slider and calls updateLive() which interpolates the umbra position between the precomputed path crossings (positionAt app.js:382) and moves the umbra + penumbra circles on the map (app.js:419-421) now added a rec button too allows to save gif files with the duration max of 2m every.
So the circles time readout and countdown all update live every second.
Before 16:00 UT it shows a countdown after 20:00 UT it shows "Eclipse over"
The TIME_CURVES array is filled (js/app.js:763) with objects in the shape of {time_ut, coords}. Then, the crossings array, which is built from TIME_CURVES (js/app.js:364-380), is filled with objects in the shape of {tUT, p} but, and here is the problem, you try to set the tUT property from a nonexistent tUT property in the TIME_CURVES element -it should be tc.time_ut or something derived from it- (js/app.js:377).
What happens then is that positionAt (js/app.js:382) goes through all the elements in crossings comparing the tUT argument passed into the function to undefined because the items in crossings all have their tUT property as undefined. This results in positionAt always returning crossings[crossings.length - 1].
And so, no matter what tMinutes argument you pass to updateLive (js/app.js:404), it will always get the same position into pos and it will always set the umbraCircle and the penumbraCircle at the same latitude and longitude. And so, nothing gets animated in the map. Or, to be more precise, it does get animated but is always painted at the same position.
Next time, you might want to consider skipping the insults.
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