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I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

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Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#221

Post by antisemiotic »

braythwayt wrote: post #134
antisemiotic wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions. Of course, just like anyone's free to say "it's a generic 4:4 I–V–vi–IV pop song, nothing to write home about" or "it's yet another ISO standard blogpost, don't bother clicking through the popup". Though I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden…

I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden blogpost would be a sea-shanty with changing time signatures and atonal riffs with a rabid scene kid at the vocals - kind of bizzare, kind of crass, fully useless for pulling a rope on a galleon. To my great delight, this phrase illustrates the value of writing with feeling and metaphor. It captures my imagination and motivates me to think about your argument carefully.

I've never argued that metaphors make for worse technical writing. It's just that you've started the discussion defending putting random pics into a blog post, and now you're trying to paint opposition to these as an opposition to creative technical writing (vide the sibling post about Raymond Smullyan). I think we might be in a violent agreement here, actually.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#222

Post by braythwayt »

antisemiotic wrote: post #221
braythwayt wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden blogpost would be a sea-shanty with changing time signatures and atonal riffs with a rabid scene kid at the vocals - kind of bizzare, kind of crass, fully useless for pulling a rope on a galleon. To my great delight, this phrase illustrates the value of writing with feeling and metaphor. It captures my imagination and motivates me to think about your argument carefully.

I've never argued that metaphors make for worse technical writing. It's just that you've started the discussion defending putting random pics into a blog post, and now you're trying to paint opposition to these as an opposition to creative technical writing (vide the sibling post about Raymond Smullyan). I think we might be in a violent agreement here, actually.

+1

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#223

Post by MaxBarraclough »

deiznof wrote: post #158
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm hoping that the community will mature alongside its technology. Which technology? Web development frameworks seem to have a half-life of about 12 months. 'Mature' and 'obsolete' are near synonymous.

This really just isn't true about the javascript scene anymore, and hasn't been for a little while now. React and Angular alone make up the vast majority of framework usage and they've been out for years. Honestly, a lot of javascript criticism I see nowadays is a little outdated.

> This really just isn't true about the javascript scene anymore

Still looks true to me. I gave the example of Polymer in my other comment.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#224

Post by hermitdev »

onefuncman wrote: post #125
hermitdev wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't worked with Java much, but have done enough to have a thorough dislike of its built-in date libs. Trying to parse dates, for example, "2019-01-40" is accepted, and actually returns February 9, 2019. I'm not aware of Any other date lib that would accept this. The behavior was certainly surprising to me. Only found out because my QA guy at the time tried it, was also surprised by the result and filed a bug ag…

this complaint is almost as old as the Java language. you should use Jodatime if you can't upgrade to Java 8+ yet -- see https://www.joda.org/joda-time/

It also reminds of a quirk in DB2. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but in versions 6 and 7 circa 2003, '2019-06-24T24:00:00' and '2019-06-25T00:00:00' would never compare equal, yet they are the exact same point in time, excepting some rare leap seconds.

Edit: spelling

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#225

Post by zrobotics »

klez wrote: post #68
zrobotics wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is googling something not the lazy option though? Personally, I think it's far more work to ask someone and wait for the answer over immediately getting the answer from searching and finding a 4 year old forum post with the same question.

Tell that to my dad. He just picks up the phone and asks me why the printer is not working. On an OS I don't even know how to use, for that matter. Also remember, I can find a vastly greater breath of information cause I can search in English. He can't. Now that I think of it, this may even be a counterpoint to "just Google it".

Don't worry, my parents still call me for things like that, and they don't even have the excuse of being non-english speakers. I will say, if you have the time, set your folks up with something like Linux mint: my step-dad somehow mahaged to get malware on a Mac, and it's much easier for me to keep an identical Mint VM around so I can walk him through everything screen-by-screen. Honestly, setting up their new printer was harder on my mom's Win10 machine, which greatly surprised me.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#226

Post by thatoneuser »

thinkingemote wrote: post #214
thatoneuser wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great example of this is AWS. I'm not a power user but I dabble. You have to go back and forth through user docs that all have some % of the correct steps, but no single doc has all of the correct steps. Some reference deprecated api, some just never seemed to work in the first place and you wonder how it even got there. I get that these ecosystems evolve over time but I'm not convinced that that evolution requires…

Hah! Worse is over a day you open a dozen or so pages about a topic lets say SES and scan through them then later youre back to looking for some thing which you know exists on one of the pages and now you have to trawl over everything again trying to find it seemingly at random. It's like you need to keep an index of things in your head when reading AWS docs as you know the information is dispersed across multiple di…

Oh God. Playing the game with browser tabs where after 30 or so you start getting casual. Then one comes up you need and you know you closed it but no other details.

Man life is crazy.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#227

Post by thatoneuser »

ddxxdd wrote: post #210
thatoneuser wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great example of this is AWS. I'm not a power user but I dabble. You have to go back and forth through user docs that all have some % of the correct steps, but no single doc has all of the correct steps. Some reference deprecated api, some just never seemed to work in the first place and you wonder how it even got there. I get that these ecosystems evolve over time but I'm not convinced that that evolution requires…

I feel like Android and iPhone programming are exactly the same way. The official documentation is confusing and worthless to me.

God yes. Android was my first big experience with this issue, and it was like my first time working with a big name modern library.

The community was brutal. At least felt that way. Every other question met with snark and "wHy dOnT yoU rEaD documentation???"

I get that with aws too. It's like you aren't following it cuz it's trash.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#228

Post by cafard »

hermitdev wrote: post #101
klez wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one particular case where a look at a reference is warranted: when something doesn't behave as expected. For example, the other day someone asked on stackoverflow why a particular Java class to calculate a difference between two dates was returning a weird result when they asked for the difference in days. Turns out, the class would calculate the difference in years AND months AND days, so if you asked for th…

I haven't worked with Java much, but have done enough to have a thorough dislike of its built-in date libs. Trying to parse dates, for example, "2019-01-40" is accepted, and actually returns February 9, 2019. I'm not aware of Any other date lib that would accept this. The behavior was certainly surprising to me. Only found out because my QA guy at the time tried it, was also surprised by the result and filed a bug ag…

JavaScript on Chrome and Firefox will accept days up to 31, regardless of month--'9/31/2019' will be October 1. On the other hand, IE 11 really doesn't care how big the day is--100, 1000, it's all good. "new Date('6/1000/2019') is Feb 24 2022 as far as IE 11 is concerned.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#229

Post by MaxBarraclough »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #137
jhoh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Web development frameworks seem to have a half-life of about 12 months. Initial realeases of the most popular JS-frameworks: Angular – 2010 React – 2013 Vue – 2014

Polymer 0.5 - circa 2014 Polymer 1 - 2015 Polymer 2 - 2017 Polymer 3 - 2018 LitElement - 2019 (I'm aware that Polymer insists it isn't a 'framework'. But it is. If their breaking changes cause incompatibilities between components using different Polymer versions, that's what I call a 'framework'.)

*also the ~recent deprecation of Bower
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