Spent 4 hours debugging a “button” styling, worked fine locally but not on production.!

After striking out “cache” issues, “browser” versions, “fonts”, “sass errors” the error was with a stupid chrome extension that appended a css class attribute to the “HTML” tag 😡

And the other developer thought that was a part of what was written in the code !!

Hate these kinda plugins that manipulate the DOM 😪

P S the plugin is "Grammarly".

I like webpack, but maybe not anymore after today.

Was working on my side project with already configured webpack and after some time I realised somethong is wrong with my styles, but it was not before.

Then I realised, that Chrome won't load CSS at all. I checked my source, but it seems to be perfectly fine. No errors while building. CSS is even included in the bundle generated...WHAT THE FUCK?

Friend: What do you know about Wordpress?

Me: Why???

Friend: My assistant made changes to my organization’s website and now it’s messed up. The page formatting is off.

Me: Wordpress has a version history for some things. Maybe go back to an earlier point in time?

Friend: I think she changed something that the vendor told us not to touch.

Me: Like a custom plugin that your website vendor made?

Friend: Maybe…

Me: Why is your assistant even touching things like that?

Friend: I really don’t want to contact the vendor because I don’t think they’re very good with website development. And I have no idea what this would cost.

Me: You might have to bite the bullet on the cost. And maybe fire that assistant for a butthole move like that. At least you have messaging to explain the wonky css is due to technical difficulties. RIP to your website.

Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.

My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.

We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."

As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".

His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.

But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...

Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.