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The self-hating web developer

joequery.me

51–60 of 214 posts

Re: The self-hating web developer

#51

The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous. I know several people who started programming only to get twisted and turned around by experienced developers saying, "Don't learn PHP" then "Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well." I talk to them a week later, and they're trying to build a simple web app in functional Haskell, and their environment is all messed up because they are using a zsh configuration the…

> it doesn't matter if it's vim or emacs or notepad

Yes! it matters if it's plain vanilla notepad, notepad++ would be better, you don't want to see someone else code opened in notepad, tabs and spaces and newlines will mixed like spaghetti.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#52
post #20

There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the existence of it. Choose wisely and re-evaluate that choice periodically to see whether your peer group continues to represent your goals and values. Why? Your peer group literally gets arbitrary code execution on your brain. (It's a flaw in MonkeyBrainOS 1.01 whi…

Opinions come from passion. You don't care for opinions because you are not passionate about programming. You just want to get a job done. To you, these opinions are noise.

The obvious counterexample: Linus Torvalds.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#53
post #46
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Frankly, I have a hard time believing that the misanthropic commenters on r/programming are major opensource contributors. The most prolific programmers simply don't have time to waste on comment threads.

I pulled back from the community around some of the stuff I use for much the same reason, it's the same people telling other people they are "doing it wrong" and yet almost without fail those people aren't doing anything interesting.

The ones I still respect don't say a real lot but either have amazing blogs full of interesting stuff or repo's full of interesting and useful projects.

As my grandfather used to say "don't tell me I'm wrong, show me".

Re: The self-hating web developer

#54
I have been in the business for 15 years now.I started as the guy that did the table-and-frameset static websites, and if I look back now there's a myriad of things that I had to learn and 75% of that I have probably forgotten again. The myriad of protocols, languages, frameworks, toolkits that you have to keep up to date with. Fashions in what the devs think is cool and what the customers ask for.

The most amazing thing to me however is what the browser and web technology now allow you to do. The way I see it, browsers are not document viewers anymore, they are akin to operating systems, and the web dev skills you have let you make awesome stuff you'd never dream of 10 years ago.

I have been tinkering with packaged chrome apps and UPNP, and in my mind it's nuts that I can do this, me, the humble web developer.

So to echo one of the sibling posts here: Just go and build something. Doesn't matter what. In the end what matters is whether people use your software or not. If you blogged and it made a difference, don't let anybody rubbish that for you. You're already a cut above the rest.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#55
I've been affected by this recently. I used to focus on the outcome, on real problems solved; on value created, to help people - not impress them. An outcome/engineering approach focusing on ends, not means (maintainability etc is a result, though logically secondary to the thing itself).

Helping people is way more satisfying than impressing them.

For example, youtube and facebook have helped many people, even though they use PHP. And PHP has helped a lot of people, by being simple and effective (I've always thought templates are a simple but brilliant idea).

As a learning method, it's not about getting a comprehensive, deep understanding, but actually doing something useful, and just learning what you need for that. You get satisfaction along the way, and the pieces come together, giving you a lead for comprehensive understanding - if needed.

[ PS Personally I got turned off webdev years ago by tedious browser-compatibility - though I understand that's long been solved by platforms like jquery etc. Also, it needs more visual design aptitude than I have... ]

Re: The self-hating web developer

#56
post #48

The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous. I know several people who started programming only to get twisted and turned around by experienced developers saying, "Don't learn PHP" then "Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well." I talk to them a week later, and they're trying to build a simple web app in functional Haskell, and their environment is all messed up because they are using a zsh configuration the…

I totally agree, and this is why I am quite angry with the "basic is bad for your brain" statement from Djiktra. I understand the sentiment, but the idea that starting with very basic "non-rigorous" language is not only a waste of time but will even hold you back make me lost several years on my programming career.

I see where he was coming from but I initially learnt BASIC (on a ZX-81) then moved to Pascal (Turbo Pascal on DOS) then Delphi with side branches into C and a some other languages.

These days I'm a web dev mostly using PHP and a lot of Python, I feel no need to justify my choices anymore, I could write a HTTP stack in C if I wanted to but I choose not to.

Ruby looks interesting, Go looks interesting, all this stuff is good stuff, I hate the attitude of "because X exists I must defend my choice of Y to the death", nothing is lost personally when someone else uses another language.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#57
post #46
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Frankly, I have a hard time believing that the misanthropic commenters on r/programming are major opensource contributors. The most prolific programmers simply don't have time to waste on comment threads.

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F★CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f★ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

- Linus Torvalds, principal author of the Linux kernel

Re: The self-hating web developer

#58

The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous. I know several people who started programming only to get twisted and turned around by experienced developers saying, "Don't learn PHP" then "Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well." I talk to them a week later, and they're trying to build a simple web app in functional Haskell, and their environment is all messed up because they are using a zsh configuration the…

The conveyor belt metaphor is one of the best that I have ever heard. It's fine to start out with anything, I did pascal/visual basic in high school. Then did Java/PHP in college. First year of college I did contract work in PHP and in WordPress. It was fun the first year or so and I love that I could have that "instant gratification" moments that PHP is famous for. Then as I grew and learned about things like concur…

The hatred of PHP amongst a certain type is hilarious, they automatically assume that if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer".

I choose to use PHP despite been capable of using most any language I wanted, over the years I've used and forgotten many languages and for the requirements I have PHP was a good fit.

Also modern PHP really isn't like old PHP, composer, PSR's, The FIG folks, decent frameworks (Symfony in particular along with Laravel), huge numbers of usable libraries.

Yeah the language has issues but then a) what language doesn't b) with experience you can avoid them.

When you get down to it I only care about providing value whether that is to myself or my customers and they really don't care what language was used as long as it works.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#60
Okay, Joe,

I had to drop out at age 20 to financially provide for my mother (who was experiencing a major depressive episode and could not work)...

It's possible that you are experiencing the same thing. I have no qualifications to offer in this respect, but don't take this possibility lightly.

...and my two younger siblings (ages 2 and 6 at the time). ... There I was at age 20 providing for a sizable family... being a good son for my mother and being a good brother for my siblings. I was performing the role of the man my father and my siblings' fathers refused to be. I was entering the workforce as a real programmer. I was proud.

Oh, and rightly so! A real man is someone who steps up like this--someone like you--not someone who implements file systems in assembly.

So here is where I might have some qualifications to offer. I've been a pro developer since before you were born. I've done orbital calculations, nuclear weapons effect mitigation, realtime hardware, done standards committee work...in so many languages (Fortran, Lisp, C, C++,...up through Swift), but there have been times when the development platform I've chosen has been one that was held in low esteem by a lot of programmers (BASIC, Perl 4 CGI years after Perl 5 w/mod_perl was common), or not even considered programming at all (e.g., Excel, FileMaker).

I chose these as the best tools for the particular job under whatever normal or bizarre circumstances existed, and whatever tool, X, I was working with at the time, I was known as "the X guy" by my coworkers. And those coworkers have changed again, and again, and again, so remember me as an X guy, others a Y or Z guy.

I eventually learned to just focus on being as valuable as I could. Usually, what people need most from me is not arcane physics or CS knowledge (darn it! I worked hard on that) but just my ability to find them a solution that is most helpful to them. The most helpful solutions are usually not technologically impressive, as it turns out. I'd rather build them some microservices in Go but sign them up for SquareSpace instead and fill in a template.

Turn your attention, not to other programmers, but to the people you can help with your skills and to their problems. Try to get a lot more of your professional satisfaction from being useful to people who need you and less from how elite you think you are perceived to be by other programmers.

Web dev gives you all sorts of ways to be extremely useful to people. Do it. Feel good about solving their problems and let it motivate you to keep improving your ability to come up with valuable solutions. Yes, I understand that building yet another CRUD web app to sell dog food or whatever doesn't feel like curing cancer, but those people are trying to support their families, too, and it's not easy, and they need your help.

At the same time, yes, I can relate to a personal desire to do technically demanding work (but do it for the personal satisfaction of taking on the challenge, not to impress other programmers), but the way most people get into that is not usually to get an advanced degree. They prove themselves valuable at less technically demanding work, work on side projects in areas that interest them to develop new skills and, at some point, they spot an opening to utilize (make useful) those new skills for their employer. If it works out, their job responsibilities might change. Do it again and again, and eventually they will change.

I hope that turning your focus toward the people who need you and away from other programmers can help restore your self-respect and motivation. Good luck.

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