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I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

justinjackson.ca

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Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#101

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

brightball wrote: post #53
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #49

His description of what web dev felt like in those early days captures how I feel about VR now. Back then it was obvious to me that was the coolest thing you could possibly learn. Still to me it is outrageously cool that I can think something up and then in not that much time it can be a website. So whats the new magic? To me it's the idea of being able to think something up and conjour it into the virtual world too.

I’m curious if you could elaborate on that some. VR just seems like another type of game design to me, as someone who isn’t active in the space. Yours is the first perspective I’ve seen that actually made me curious.

If you get a chance to try it, or maybe you already have - you get this odd sense of presence when using VR. It's not quite the same as playing a normal game. Even just perspectives of things like size seem much more real in VR. Even with today's early hardware it's pretty good at tricking your brain.

This combination of presence and multiplayer create these crazy (to me) experiences where it's like you're stepping into the internet to meet people and explore it with them.

VRChat is one of the more popular examples, but most of it stuff still needs to be built in the first place.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#102

Post by GuB-42 »

ransom1538 wrote: post #54
tomhoward wrote: post #20

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfo…

Web3 is cryptocurrencies? Are we sure about this? Just because it was on someones blog?

Web3 as it is known today is a term coined by Gavin Wood, cofounder of Ethereum, and all of his notable work is related to blockchain technology, and that includes web3.

Despite all the vague talk about freedom, really, web3 is all about cryptocurrencies. That is, web3 needs cryptocurrencies to work and it has no reason to exist without cryptocurrencies.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#103

Post by layer8 »

smoldesu wrote: post #94
dncornholio wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

too be honest, a comment of someone doesn't make it true. It could be he has actual use cases for these repositories. Just that someone thinks it should'nt be used like this, doesn't mean it's true. It seems like a lot of people think they think how npm should work, while forgetting to see how npm actually works. There's even an example of a well respected npm author that has repositories with just a few lines.. Y'al…

The "joke" is that you can determime whether a number is odd or even with a modulo in half the code and a fraction of the storage space of a library. There is no use case for it because it's a built-in feature of the language, and in the age of inane web bloat, supply chain attacks and Javascript cargo-culting, I think laughing at stuff like this is perfectly warranted.

> you can determime whether a number is odd or even with a modulo

Or you could check the lowest bit. Better to abstract away from that implementation decision. ;)

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#104

Post by dijit »

Accacin wrote: post #27
marginalia_nu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, 30 seconds maybe if it was a lot of images? I remember it took about 20-30 minutes to download an mp3 in the dialup days. Most websites were in the kilobytes because everyone was on dialup. Also keep in mind most screens would have been 640x480, so it's not like you were getting high res images.

I remember waiting like a whole night to download an MP3. When I tried to play it the next day, my laptop was so old and slow that it couldn't play the MP3 without stuttering :D

Small reminder that the PS1 was so weak it couldn't even play 128kbit (IE; quite poor quality) MP3s in real time

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#105

Post by smoldesu »

layer8 wrote: post #103
smoldesu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "joke" is that you can determime whether a number is odd or even with a modulo in half the code and a fraction of the storage space of a library. There is no use case for it because it's a built-in feature of the language, and in the age of inane web bloat, supply chain attacks and Javascript cargo-culting, I think laughing at stuff like this is perfectly warranted.

> you can determime whether a number is odd or even with a modulo Or you could check the lowest bit. Better to abstract away from that implementation decision. ;)

That too, but I get the feeling those kinds of operations aren't in Javascript's standard library...

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#106

Post by layer8 »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #8
trevormcneal wrote: post #6

I miss those times. I could spend hours complaining about the depressive current state of the web, I imagine being a newcomer to such world and have to handle the over complexity of the current scenario without knowing that things could be simpler. I remember seeing a team member migrating a project from grunt to webpack, the project was just a 404 page. "You need to compile your assets" they say, just a cat *.css >…

First job title in 2007 was "web master". 15 years later and i feel more like a web dinosaur than a web master. sick of it all.

More like a web orchestrator these days, so maybe “web maestro”. ;)

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#107

Post by duxup »

I like this article as I'm pretty nostalgic about those things too.

>Our websites were pretty damned ugly. Instead of worrying about window dressing, we focused on words, hierarchy, and structure.

Naw, the sites were ugly because we were bad at window dressing and the tools were wonky ... and it was glorious that we were bad at it. I loved the ugly web. It reeked of "trying things".

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#108

Post by layer8 »

ashneer wrote: post #3

I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.

I remember you could often watch images being slowly rendered line-by-line in the browser due to slow connections or slow servers back in 1994/1995.

In the meantime computers and the internet became so fast that websites could be very fast by default, but the front-end tech stack and adtech still makes it slow most of the time.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#109

Post by marginalia_nu »

cookiengineer wrote: post #18
marginalia_nu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, 30 seconds maybe if it was a lot of images? I remember it took about 20-30 minutes to download an mp3 in the dialup days. Most websites were in the kilobytes because everyone was on dialup. Also keep in mind most screens would have been 640x480, so it's not like you were getting high res images.

> Eh, 30 seconds maybe if it was a lot of images? Depends on the amount of gifs people were placing on their website :D We only had a 56k modem at the time. The Browser was provided by the ISP at first due to lack of dial-up software that supported the German ISPs, so it was loading all kinds of injected stuff from the ISP, too. But yeah, I agree with the general sentiment that websites usually loaded way faster if y…

I think it depends on when we are speaking. 56k became increasingly miserable as higher speeds became the norm.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#110

Post by shafyy »

k__ wrote: post #96
tomhoward wrote: post #20

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfo…

I'm an educator and right now, I'm evaluating the crypto space. A huge problem here is that it's very fast moving. Take the fast moving Web of the 90s and multiply it by how much more people use the Web today. At Eth Amsterdam I talked to many engineers from that space and didn't get a satisfying answer to many questions devs usually ask about new tech. "Where should you store your data?" - "It depends!" Back in the…

The reason the "engineers" at that conference couldn't give you straight answers is because blockchain doesn't have good answers.
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