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Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

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Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

#61

Post by excalq »

dandanisaur wrote: post #39
robeastham wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at Susy for layout, bit more flexible than Bootstrap: https://github.com/oddbird/susy Also for static site generators take a look at: https://middlemanapp.com/ (Ruby) http://gohugo.io/ (Go) https://github.com/getpelican/pelican (Python) When you need to go beyond static sites and take a look at the web frameworks - Ruby on Rails is the obvious one, but I reckon that Meteor ( https://www.meteor.com/ ) coul…

Imo I'd hold off on susy. Bootstrap is a great start for a beginner abs it's used in a ton of environments.

I took several years away from the front-end to focus on Backend and DevOps, only recently re-upping my front-end-fu. Since I knew CSS 2.0, I found Bootstrap quite easy to pick up and be productive with in about a day, not previously knowing CSS griding. And I found myself saying over again, holy shit where was this back in "my day"!

Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

#62

Post by dredmorbius »

HTML5. Read Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into HTML5. And by read, I mean, both the material, and view-source and his stylesheets. The site itself is a tour de force of what he describes.

CSS2 and CSS3. The latter is where CSS headed, though it's still in development.

You can do a hell of a lot of sensible page design with just straight HTML5 and some modest amounts of CSS.

Javascript for any automation.

CodePen is a great place to play with (and explore for) ideas. StackExchange and Reddit's /r/WebDev and other subs for Q&A with other developers.

Maciej Cegłowski's rants on current Web faults / advertising / privacy http://idlewords.com/

There are others who hit this point, and do it well, but Maciej makes a compelling case on all three points (with essays featured here on Hacker News). My read is that the Web is headed for a crisis on the point of design, on many grounds (readability, privacy, annoyances, accessibility), and that, despite much of what I've written above, read Web design may well die. With "Reader Mode" features being included in more browsers these days (Safari, Firefox, Chrome is coming up with it, Opera's had it, not sure about MSIE), readers can simply opt out of design. Which may be a Good Thing.

Enjoy.

Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

#63

Post by dwd »

blhack wrote: post #55

Here's a semi-controversial opinion: you probably don't need to learn much. You don't need hipster.js to build a website. You can still build websites that can be used by millions of people using PHP, mysql, and HTML. Lots and lots of people will tell you to learn hipster.js, and will imply that if you aren't using something written by 3 20 year olds in a coffee shop during a hackathon, that you can't get The Scale.…

Agreed - unless you have to work with youngsters who insist on "shiny new things" you can still use the same languages you are familiar with to just get stuff done.

Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

#64

Post by santaclaus »

dwd wrote: post #63
blhack wrote: post #55

Here's a semi-controversial opinion: you probably don't need to learn much. You don't need hipster.js to build a website. You can still build websites that can be used by millions of people using PHP, mysql, and HTML. Lots and lots of people will tell you to learn hipster.js, and will imply that if you aren't using something written by 3 20 year olds in a coffee shop during a hackathon, that you can't get The Scale.…

Agreed - unless you have to work with youngsters who insist on "shiny new things" you can still use the same languages you are familiar with to just get stuff done.

> unless you have to work with youngsters who insist on "shiny new things"

I know quite a few oldsters with shiny new thing syndrome.

Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

#65

Post by habitue »

blhack wrote: post #55

Here's a semi-controversial opinion: you probably don't need to learn much. You don't need hipster.js to build a website. You can still build websites that can be used by millions of people using PHP, mysql, and HTML. Lots and lots of people will tell you to learn hipster.js, and will imply that if you aren't using something written by 3 20 year olds in a coffee shop during a hackathon, that you can't get The Scale.…

This isn't a very controversial opinion on HN. It's the standard "js developers are just crazy ADHD kids and all they do is chase the latest shiny framework every week". It gets featured prominently in every thread that mentions webdev.

It's also wrong. There is a spectrum from early adopter to head-buried-in-the-sand cobol developer, and most people would agree there are trade-offs to being on either end.

Suggesting to someone who has been out of the game for 15 years that basically nothing has changed is doing him a disservice and not answering the question. He's asking about what he's missing, it's better to let him in on it and let him decide for himself if it's really just the same old shit repackaged.

Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

#67

Post by gaius »

SignMeTheHELLUp wrote: post #22

Wow, there is a lot of awful advice in this thread. HTML, Javascript and CSS are still extremely important and they have come a long way since 1990. Forget everything you knew about them and research their state in 2016. You have a lot to learn, but you'll find all three more powerful and expressive today than they were in 1990. There is currently a big shift in the way clients want their websites to work. In the pas…

But users hate them. Users want their browser's back button to work in a sensible way.

Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

#68

Post by anonyfox »

joeyspn wrote: post #16

> But in the little free time I have available > But after work and family, there isn't much time left If you want to ship ASAP with little time investment, IMO nothing beats Meteor. Skills required: HTML, CSS, JS. I've built projects with PHP, Rails, Django, Node, Angular, etc ... and Meteor is the framework I recommend to newcomers. Ok, you're not exactly a newcomer, but clearly you've been disconnected many years…

I'll second this.

Meteor is in fact the fastest way to achieve a webapp nowadays. You can learn it in a weekend if you want to, and drafting highly dynamic interfaces is a breeze.

If you want to scale later, in terms of code complexity as well as runtime performance and so on, Meteor isn't that good, but having thousands of concurrent users is a luxury problem to have.

To get an idea out the door, Meteor.

(I'm a fullstack dev who has worked with dozens of languages and even more frameworks, and went through all the popular frontend tech's since jquery, so: been there, done stuff)

Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

#69

Post by phlandis »

cpayne wrote: post #56
blhack wrote: post #55

Here's a semi-controversial opinion: you probably don't need to learn much. You don't need hipster.js to build a website. You can still build websites that can be used by millions of people using PHP, mysql, and HTML. Lots and lots of people will tell you to learn hipster.js, and will imply that if you aren't using something written by 3 20 year olds in a coffee shop during a hackathon, that you can't get The Scale.…

THIS is spot on! The only thing I'd add is to choose one of those technologies (jQuery / Node / Angular / Whatever!) and learn it (reasonably) well. I can't tell you how many times I've used Pluralsight to bone up on a particular technology...

Actually wouldn't it be better to learn multiple technologies while avoiding crossover? I suggest learning JS and JQuery for your front end. Writing your back end API in PHP and mySQL. Linking them with AJAJson.

Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

#70

Post by herbst »

blhack wrote: post #55

Here's a semi-controversial opinion: you probably don't need to learn much. You don't need hipster.js to build a website. You can still build websites that can be used by millions of people using PHP, mysql, and HTML. Lots and lots of people will tell you to learn hipster.js, and will imply that if you aren't using something written by 3 20 year olds in a coffee shop during a hackathon, that you can't get The Scale.…

Agreed. Learn Bootstrap and safe design time, and give a fuck about all that hypster technologie. A framework in your favorite language with a proper ORM would definitly help tho.
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