Thank you, Mr Munroe, but I still can't wrap my feeble mind around it. It's still just too weird.
459 karma · joined June 2, 2015
I also tinker with Swift.
https://albright.pro/
…At least, that's the official story. I recall there being a lot of conspiracy theory-like buzz at the time from people who also couldn't believe NASA could make such a stupid error like that. It does make you wonder.
Kim Jong-un is probably the only person in his nation who is seriously at risk of type 2 diabetes.
Indeed. I'm a Mac user, so that makes it a non-starter. =/
I had to hold my nose and paste some commands like this in order to reinstall Composer [1] and Drupal Console [2] earlier this week. Ugh, it feels so dirty, but it's often the first and/or the easiest, if not the only, way that software like this documents how it's to be installed.
Meh.
I guess that's the main difference between it and ag…?
…sorry.
Did you forget the period in time where Steve Jobs was making that argument and even he got BTFO?
At any rate, on Slack, I once drag-and-dropped a text file with the output of a shell script that a colleague wanted to see. He started telling me how it was strange that the output seemed to cut off right in the middle of a line. lol, just kidding, Slack was just cutting it off like that, since Slack apparently can't show more than the first few K of a text file for some reason SO WHY IS IT SHOWING IT AT ALL ARGH
This current submission just links to Smashing's front page.
Yes, I understand that it's still friendlier to use than IRC, but there's a middle ground between "easy to use" and "still looks and works like a proper, professional desktop application." In fact, HipChat is pretty close, even though it's just a wrapped web page too.
It's kind of frustrating to see that all of these Slack alternatives are pretty much taking the same crappy UI cues from Slack. It's kind of like how, until the last few years or so, many common Unix/Linux desktops looked like Win95 rip-offs… You don't need to strive for familiarity if what people are familiar with sucks.
Let's look at your "tired problems." "Interface with a database." Yep. Hey, which database? Do you use the tired and true MySQL? Do you trade up to Postgres's improved features in exchange for possibly reduced compatibility? Do you do NoSQL like all the cool kids? Great, now which NoSQL database? Will your app really benefit from it? Okay, you picked a database; do you write SQL directly, or use a pre-built database layer/ORM of some sort? If the former, do you know how to escape your arguments and make sure you're not inviting injection exploits? Do you know how to write efficient queries that will touch as few database rows as possible? If the latter, will it hide needed capability from you or behave much slower than using straight SQL? What are the trade-offs? Do you perhaps use specialty databases like Solr for search or Redis for key-value storage in addition to your main one? Is the increased complexity worth the potential speed or flexibility increases? Can you make sure queries to those databases are secure too?
Or "handling user accounts." Oh my God, okay. Do you let people sign up with usernames? Just email addresses? Do you allow multiple accounts with the same email address? If someone has signed up with the username "Helen" (with an ell), do you let someone else sign up as "He1en" (with a one) or "He|en" (with a pipe) and possibly impersonate them? How do you store the password? No, that's wrong. No, that's also wrong. How do you let people reset their password if they forget it? Oh, wow, that's very wrong! Are you storing credit card numbers or addresses or other personal information? How do you do user permissions, so some user accounts have administration permissions that others don't? How do you avoid XSS exploits that might allow an unprivileged user from taking over an administrator account? What if you want someone who's between a normal user and an administrator who has some edit privileges but can't take down the whole site?
Okay, got all that worked out? Okay, now make it respond in 200ms or less from all points in the world. And compliant with these government regulations the client is just now telling you about two weeks before the scheduled launch. And also look and work the same in Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, five different strains of Arabic, and, most cruelly, German, whose long words bring many unprepared web designers to tears. And on mobile.
Granted, many devs will work with a framework or CMS that helps solve some of these issues for us, but even then we need to understand the inner workings of that system and what the trade-offs are in order to truly exploit it.
Having spent so much time on the Windows side of things, is there some aspect of that ecosystem that you find yourself missing even after the year or so you've been on a Mac?
All that aside… the "rockstar" attitude rankles, though really, it's something you'll mostly see in job listings and such than from web developers themselves. I can't recall meeting any developers in this industry who would refer to themselves as a rockstar with a straight face, but I've met a couple bosses who said things like "we only hire rockstars" and such. So to the extent that a skilled web developer seriously says they're a rockstar, they probably only do so to angle for a job, I'd imagine.