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The self-hating web developer

joequery.me

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Re: The self-hating web developer

#131

Post by justwannasing »

PopeOfNope wrote: post #114
justwannasing wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in embedded programming, systems programming and, now, web dev. No. The "quality of people" is not generally the same or, more specifically, you're less likely to find PHP coders among system developers.

If you don't mind my asking, why aren't you still doing embedded programming? I'm a web developer looking to move to embedded programming and I'm always curious to hear about why people made the opposite decision. :)

Seasons change, and so did I. You need not wonder why.

Things just fell that way. I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in programming for the web or the web at all. Then I was involved in an event that had no money and needed a web site. Which led to another. Long story short, own my own web dev company for 11 years and 10 employees and making more money than ever before.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#132

Post by justwannasing »

kelseydh wrote: post #89
justwannasing wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, now you know one who started out writing machine code. And I'll tell you, don't learn PHP and Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well. But any noob switching to Haskell to do a simple web app is equally insane.

Rails may not scale well, but it's incredibly fast for pumping out CRUD apps. I've seen noobies in Rails move much faster than Node.js projects. Likewise I'm sure someone has seen the opposite. I'm not here to tell you Rails is better than alternatives, but as programmers we need stop being so scathing in our opinions about other languages or frameworks. Has it ever occurred to you that somebody may have started lear…

I find that those who start out with PHP cause they have to are working for companies who presume you need PHP and a database for anything related to the web but could never explain to you a technical reason for it.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#133

Post by temo4ka »

hex13 wrote: post #110
hamburglar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that "web dev" covers such a wide range of roles. "Uploading WordPress isn't web development" is a subjective statement, and a lot of people who can only do CSS and very minor code copy/paste/tweak get to call themselves "web devs." This OP sounds like someone who got in a rung or two above "uploads WordPress" and has convinced himself he needs to transform into a full-fledged ninja programmer in order…

> lot of people who can only do CSS I appreciate people "who can only do CSS". CSS is underrated skill but experienced CSS developer has to know about: - every browser quirk possible. - various standard hacks to workaround these quirks - preprocessors like Sass or Less - tons of completely non-logical CSS rules (eg: `margin: auto` will center only horizontally but not vertically ) - methodologies like BEM, OCSS or SM…

Frontend development has always been hell. Everyone who has done it professionally knows this.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#134

Post by noir_lord »

facetube wrote: post #129
joesmo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is a perfect example of what the author is referring to: stupid people in the community trying to make others feel inferior for programming in a certain technology. When it comes to PHP, such posts are inevitable (that's how I know PHP is actually a good, useful language). About the people who post them, I will assume that you: 1. Are incredibly stupid (register globals has been deprecated for years) 2. Are…

FWIW, PHP 4.x was completely awful for large and/or OOP codebases due to the totally insane copy-by-default semantics, the need to use &= perfectly at every call site that returned an instance of a class, and a handful of reference-counting bugs that caused interpreter crashes and still weren't fixed when 5.x matured. It's definitely gotten better; I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering…

> I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four.

I think that's a valid point however I'm not sure if that is better or worse when they are attacking something.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#135

Post by oriolid »

allan_s wrote: post #84

Also one of the question the OP has not answered, and that I've seen a lot of people asking themselves is How one does leave web development. I'm graduated from an engineering school, were most of my classmates were doing smallwebsites/wordpress plugins etc. on their freetime for the easy money (as anyway it's very rare, if not impossible, to find a freelance job as a student on embedded system) To the point that whe…

This is a hard question. I managed to make the switch myself a few months ago by dumb luck. A co-worker of mine designed a piece of hardware that caught some attention in local tech scene, and a consumer electronics company that was looking for consultants interviewed him and some of his co-workers. I passed, and now I'm some kind of embedded developer.

I have been in a job that was supposed to include both. It was a complete bait and switch deal, in the end most that I did was writing non-web integration code and tests. Though I didn't get much experience from actually implementing their algorithms, I knew enough of them and linear algebra to be recruited at a graphics middleware company... unfortunately that didn't last.

The CV doesn't really matter. After the graphics company had let me go, I had zero Web experience and was still hired for a backend CRUD job.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#136

Post by nostrademons »

ectoplasm wrote: post #41
patio11 wrote: 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…

I wanted to say something like your comment is just 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, but then I'd be 2nd order making you feel bad about 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, so then I just thought about how I felt and it was bad. What a mess. Good points about the importance of choosing a good peer group, I totally agree. It's really hard whe…

Interestingly, I've learned to love having more than one peer group. I felt like a floater all through high school and college, like I didn't belong anywhere, but around age 30 I started viewing that as a source of strength rather than of weakness, and "I belong everywhere" rather than "I don't belong anywhere". My wife and many of my close friends (that don't belong to any particular peer group) are the same way.

There's a certain irony where, although it sometimes feels lonely being a floater, such people often seem to have higher status when viewed from the outside. They're confident enough to not be defined by their peer group, after all. Few people are, and many people wish they were.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#137

Post by atlih »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #106
atlih wrote: post #98

I find web developers in general more knowledgeable. Sure they are not working in low level programming, but those that are working in low level programming often don't know what DNS, FTP or SQL is. Remember that those who work in low level programming had nothing to do with writing the language or building the compilers. They just got a degree and started working.

but those that are working in low level programming often don't know what DNS, FTP or SQL is That's a very baffling statement that doesn't reflect any of my experiences (I don't think you realize just how big FTP is/was). How are you defining "low-level programmer" here?

Basically anything that has to do with non-web and non-mobile apps. The app for your nearest ATM machine for example.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#138

Post by davemel37 »

patio11 wrote: 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…

If i ever met OP this is what I would tell him. There are two ways a low self esteem can materialize. One way is to put down the world to make you feel bigger than them. The other is to feel bad about yourself and proactively try to improve in anyway you can. Both might be unhealthy...but if you are like me and have a low self esteem...you are a million times better off being the second guy than the first...so you have that going for you.

The reality is that you likely noticed these negative comments and took it to heart because of deeper issues. It sounds like you had a very difficult life so far. Try to focus on the good you do. Realize that programming is a tool to create things. Creating things is the greatest thing you can do in this world. Creating is a form of giving of yourself to the world. The knowledge in your head is yours but the websites you built are a real contribution. A positive contribution. Never stop creating and giving of yourself and try to remember wheneer you see a negative comment that you are giving good to the world and that commenter is giving bad to the world. If you focus on admiring those that create and give and forget the selfish ones that take and take.. You will slowly find your self worth from the people out there who build people up not break people down.

This wont get fixed over night...but you are not alone and you are on the right track.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#139

Post by austenallred »

sillygeese wrote: post #122
austenallred wrote: post #9

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…

Momentum is the thing that truly matters. That's certainly true. You learn by doing stuff. But PHP actually is a bad language, and the guy would be better off starting with something else. Why use PHP for X years until you realize you need to move on, when you could start out with something you can still use even after that point? Even worse, he could get stuck using PHP because it's comfortable and he's used to deal…

> why use php for x years?

You don't have to use it for years. It doesn't take that long to grasp, then you can start learning other stuff. The important thing is to get moving.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#140

Post by [deleted] »

damcedami wrote: post #51
austenallred wrote: post #9

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.

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