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Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

zachholman.com

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Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#261

Post by stordoff »

samwillis wrote: post #44

They have missed out Perl CGI scripts from “Matts Script Archive”[0]! I remember much difficulty as a 13YO trying to get his “guest book” Perl script to work for the first time (with all its famous security holes). Oh, and “CGI Proxy”! Hosting that somewhere on a personal site so that we could get passed the filter on the schools internet. Anyone who knew how to host that had great power in the IT rooms! Edit: wow cg…

CGIProxy was the start of a prolonged cat-and-mouse game between the IT staff and a group of students at my school. It started with finding public hosts ("inurl:nph-proxy.cgi"), and quickly evolved to self-hosting CGIProxy on custom domains/ports. Portable Firefox could be used to sidestep some of the filtering software, until they started auto-closing any window with "Firefox" in the title and .exes called firefox.exe (both of which could also be worked around). It culminated in them creating their own domain admin account so they could disable most of the blocking/monitoring software (the main domain admin's account password being "school" made this _much_ easier than it should have been).

They only got caught because one of them was logged as using a USB drive called "'s USB" while logged in the domain admin account, which served as an interesting lesson in OPSEC.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#262

Post by theshadowknows »

lelanthran wrote: post #128
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish interviews were like this. Show them something you built and you get hired instead of the nonsense of leetcode.

My story upthread is pretty much the same, except that I demonstrated a record-keeping application written in Turbo Pascal :-)

For my very first interview I was told “write something in php” so I put together a few scripts to parse templated txt files into html and made a little baby version of a cms. Wasn’t exactly scalable or ground breaking but I thought it was cool. But the engineer that interviewed me was like so this imports text files and it took you all afternoon to build it? …didn’t get that job.

So the next one was pretty similar “hey use this language called Sikuli to build something.” Now, I’d never heard of Sikuli but it was basically python so I built a little app that, based on the screen, could offer up context sensitive hotkey chains…kind of like a baby version of Alfred that literally only worked with Microsoft office. But the guy thought it was cool and hired me anyway :)

Went from working in a gas station over night to working in my kitchen or the coffee shop. I thought it was sooooo cool

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#263

Post by ripdog »

Frost1x wrote: post #114
robbyking wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently came across an image I wasn't able to download using dev tools and was shocked. I wish I had had the time to figure it out.

If it's visible, it's capturable, it's simply a matter of how obfuscated it is and how much effort you want to spend capturing it. In highly dynamic web apps these days, it could be simple as a right click or as complex as figuring out their rendering system, source data stream, generated key handshake to verify it's the script accessing the data and not a person, and so on. I see this sort of trash a lot more than I…

I once broke the "DRM" of a site which displayed images by downloading them obfuscated and using a big blob of JS to unfsck them and display them on a canvas. Grabbing the image should be easy, no? Just use `.toDataURL()`, right? Well, this site deleted all the methods on the canvas object which could be used to grab the image data, and then `.freeze()` (or maybe it was `.seal()`, this was a while ago) to prevent the method being added back in.

In the end I said 'fuck it' and made a patched firefox build in a VM with freeze and/or seal disabled completely, then a small jetpack addon (remember them?) to unfsck the canvas element and grab them images.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#264

Post by theshadowknows »

Calavar wrote: post #196
supermatt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it is dynamic. But the author also mentioned putting spacer gifs in semantically appropriate containers, so I think it may have been a joke?

I think it is a joke. Also, as far as I can remember, you could never combine and because only IE supported and only the Netscape family of browsers supported . I think there is a lot of humor in this article that is maybe a little too subtle.

You could however nest horizontal and vertical marquee to make a diagonal marquee :)

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#266

Post by GekkePrutser »

kstrauser wrote: post #239
rufus_foreman wrote: post #120

My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was originally supposed to be Perl, the job interview was something like: Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site Owner: You wrote this? Me: Yeah. Owner: This is in Perl? Me: Yeah. So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use…

Back in the day, HTML usually came with its own built-in version control. You could view source and see exactly what thought process the web designer (read: the person who figured out HomeSite first) had gone through, like: Hi there because the editors didn’t actually understand HTML beyond what was required to wrap a tag around a block of text.

I bet this is what a word doc looks like under the hood.

Especially if you see what kind of crap code something like frontpage produced. Lots of boilerplate muck and stuff cancelling each other out.

We used to call it Strontpage at a place I worked. Stront means shit in Dutch.

Dreamweaver was so much better and it embraced CSS instead of trying to avoid it. Though I liked coding in just an editor, for me as a non-graphics person it was nice to have WYSIWYG. Of course soon after that actual graphics people started doing that work but in the beginning it was all techies.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#267

Post by mark-r »

thelittleone wrote: post #184
rufus_foreman wrote: post #120

My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was originally supposed to be Perl, the job interview was something like: Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site Owner: You wrote this? Me: Yeah. Owner: This is in Perl? Me: Yeah. So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use…

Great story. Sure sounds like Dreamweaver. My go to back then was Hotdog Pro from Sausagesoft.

I did the customized splash screen for the version of Paint Shop Pro that was bundled with Hotdog Pro.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#270

Post by mr_toad »

Aeolun wrote: post #247
oblio wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should still check out to see if your pay is competitive for your role, level, etc. Even an awesome environment might be worth moving away from if your pay goes up 50-100%. Especially if you're not super frugal or have expenses due to other reasons.

But is it worth doing leetcode? I find I can’t bring myself to do it even if it would guarantee me a FAANG position and probably triple my salary overnight.

Overengineering starts with the interview.
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