• 0 Posts
  • 160 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 21st, 2023

help-circle



  • HTML is pretty straightforward so just understanding the very basic stuff is probably all you need. CSS is where html gets any challenge it might have.

    CSS is weird because it’s very “easy” so “real developers” kind of object to learning it, but the truth is, if you gave any of them a layout design, they probably couldn’t build it. There are tools like tailwind to help, but, IMO, tailwind just helps you avoid learning css’s vocabulary, but you just replace it with having to learn tailwind’s vocabulary.

    JavaScript on the other hand is a “real” programming language, though decidedly quick-n-dirtier than other languages. It lets you be a lot more sloppy. (Tbh it’s a lot more forgiving than css!). As a result, it lacks the elegance and control that “real developers” like – and, as most people’s first language, it lets newcomers get into bad habits. For these reasons, JavaScript is a bit derided – but, unlike CSS, most developers can’t avoid it.

    There are a few key ideas in JavaScript that, once you understand them, things make a lot more sense. (I won’t get into them now, since it doesn’t sound like you’re at the point where that kind of clarity would help, but, when you are, come on back here and make a post!)

    TLDR: HTML is definitely something you can just pick up along the way. JavaScript is a real language that will take a little while to feel comfortable with, and it will take a career to master. CSS will never be easy, so don’t let it hold you back.


  • Hi everyone, JP here. This person is making a reference to the Weird Al biopic, and if you haven’t seen it, you should.

    Weird Al is an incredible person and has been through so much. I had no idea what a roller coaster his life has been! I always knew he was talented but i definitely didn’t know how strong he is.

    His autobiography will go down in history as one of the most powerful and compelling and honest stories ever told. If you haven’t seen it, you really, really should.

    ITT NO SPOILERS PLS



  • Follow up question – I’m not OP but I’m another not-really-new developer (5 years professional xp) that has 0 experience working with others:

    I have trouble understanding where to go on the spectrum of “light touch” and “doing a really good job”. (Tldr) How should a contributor gauge whether to make big changes to “do it right” or to do it a little hacky just to get the job done?

    For example, I wanted to make a dark mode for a site i use, so i pulled the sites’s repo down and got into it.

    The CSS was a mess. I’ve done dark modes for a bunch of my own projects, and I basically just assign variables (–foreground-color, --background-color), and then swap their assignments by the presence or absence of a “.dark-mode” class in the body tag.

    But the site had like 30 shades of every color, like, imperceptibly different shades of red or green. My guess was the person used a color picker and just eyeballed it.

    If the site was mine, I would normalize them all but there was such a range – some being more than 10-15% different from each other – so i tried to strike a balance in my normalization. I felt unsure whether this was done by someone who just doesn’t give a crap about color/CSS or if it was carefully considered color selection.

    My PR wasn’t accepted (though the devs had said in discord that i could/should submit a PR for it). I don’t mind that it wasn’t accepted, but i just don’t know why. I don’t want to accidentally step on toes or to violate dev culture norms.


  • While you’re not wrong, it’s important to retain a global perspective. There are “communist” leaders that were total pieces of shit and while they did have help, that help wasn’t always capitalist. Stalin is an example here.

    And then there’s pieces of shit who were supported by external forces, but not by capitalist regimes seeking to undermine them. I’m not 100% confident in this history, and there’s no way I’m going to spell his name right, but, the Romanian piece if shit, Caucescu (???) came to power riding a wave of support from the Nazis. Hitler didn’t do it to destabilize Romania, but because he was like, “there’s some good old fashioned fascist genociders down there, let’s give them more guns.” And those fascist genociders were technically communists.

    What I’m getting at is that the enemies of a worker-ruled communist state are many, and many of those enemies are within their own systems. Communism, like every other system, suffers from the fact that there are humans involved. Just because a communism exists doesn’t mean it’s going to be utopia.

    But that also doesn’t mean that communism can’t be good, or at least better.


  • Lol you just provided the simplest counter to the most common capitalist argument.

    “You don’t understand capitalism, bro. The problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the regulation on capitalism. Under a true capitalist system, there can’t be monopolies because capitalism rewards competition.”

    Ok so what happened to all the reddit apps


    Edit: I really like the reddit app example because it’s simple: no regulation or anti-capitalist force made them to that, it was literally just a capitalist decision.

    But regulatory capture is an important part of capitalism, and no matter how many ancap bullshit artists say otherwise, government is absolutely part of the capitalist plan. Giving the workers a “say” (or the illusion of one) keeps them a bit quieter, but more importantly, having a government outsources a lot of crap they would otherwise have to pay for, like infrastructure, which would be a huge strain on profits.

    In fact, the ancap bullshit idea that unregulated markets would improve things is an artificial limitation on capitalist power. Total lack of regulation is a restriction on capitalism.




  • Copy designs you like, and keep a couple of CSS files +/- web components that you can carry along with you from project to project. Tweak then as you go.

    Like everything else, getting good at making designs that you like will take time and effort, so if you want you get good at it, do it! I find it fun, and my designs aren’t to everyone’s taste (I too like black tshirts), but whatever.

    Plus, getting good at making designs that i like has made me better at making designs clients/projects will like, so, win/win.




  • jQuery is a lot smaller and less nebulous than its competitors (looking at you,React literally every JavaScript framework).

    Jquery was what was popular when i learned js. I’m kinda glad it was, honestly: jQuery is a little unique in that it doesn’t have magic to it the way js frameworks do. Everything you can do in jQuery, you can do in vanilla JavaScript pretty easily. With, say, React, how is a newcomer supposed to understand how a series of React components become HTML?

    So jQuery kept it “real” for me. Fewer abstractions between me and the HTML meant it was easier for me to connect the dots as a self taught developer.

    As for how it’s changed, it’s more any how vanilla JavaScript has changed. A lot of the things that made jQuery so much easier and cleaner than vanilla are now baked in, like document.querySelector(), element.classList, createElement(), addEventListener()… It had Ajax methods that, before jQuery, were a tremendous pain in the ass.

    jQuery was great, but, you basically had to use it with something like PHP, because it had no back end. So when angular came out (and a few others that aren’t around anymore and I’ve forgotten), it allowed you to replace both PHP and jQuery, and developers rejoiced.

    Why did they rejoice? I’m not actually sure there was reason to, objectively speaking. As developers, we like new tech, especially if that new tech requires us to think about code differently, even if, in retrospect, it’s a hard argument to make to say that, if we had just stuck with PHP and jQuery we would be somehow worse off than we are with React.

    Of course, in tech, when a new system changes how we think, sometimes (not as often as we’d like) it helps us reconsider problems and find much more elegant solutions. So, would we have all the innovations we have today if all these js frameworks has never existed? Obviously we can’t really answer that – but it’s a toke of copium for when we get nostalgic for the PHP/jQuery days.

    (Also, for you newer people reading this, you should probably be aware that the PHP/jQuery mini-stack is still very quietly used. You’ll definitely see it, especially in php-baaed COTS.)


  • arguably, that’s a good thing because it means project decisions are made uncorrupted by profit motive

    Argue-er here, chiming in. This statement could be interpreted as considering only half of the central relationship of capitalism. (Capitalism isn’t just about deriving profit from the control of surplus, it’s about the relationship between surplus and scarcity. Surplus doesn’t mean shit if no one wants what you have.)

    The decisions that volunteers make may not be motivated by the desire/ability to make profit, but they can be (and often are) motivated by the opposite; they have to account for the fact that their volunteer work is labor that isn’t contributing to their survival – aka, their day job. The demands placed on them by their other responsibilities will have to take precedence over the volunteer project.

    In practice, this means they have to take shortcuts and/or do less than they would like to, because they don’t have time to devote to it. It’s not exactly the same end product as if it was profit-seeking, since that can tempt maintainers into using dark patterns etc, but they’re similar.

    Ideally, they would have all the money they needed, didn’t have to have regular jobs, but also had families/friends/hobbies that would keep them from over-engineering ffmpeg.

    To say this in a simpler/shorter way (TD;DR), their decisions can be motivated by the fact that they aren’t making money from it, don’t have enough time or resources to do everything they might want.

    (Why is this so long?? I’m bored in the train, gotta kill the time somehow…why not say in 1000 words what I could have said in 100)