"Failure is not an option -- it comes bundled with Windows."

A good programmer can get more done than 10 bad programmers, but a bad programmer's code can keep 10 good programmers busy for years.
~ Ed Weissman

A is for Assembly, a wizard's spell

B is for Bootstrap, so bland and the same. And also for Brainf*ck, will blow you away

C is for COBOL, your grandad knows that

D is for daemon, your server knows what

E is for Express.js, you node what is coming

F is for FORTRAN, which is perferct for sciencing

G is for GNU which is GNU not UNIX

H is for Haskell using functional units

I is for Intance, An action of Object

J is for Java plays with them Always

K is for Kotlin, Android's new toy

L is for Lisp, scheming a ploy

M is for Matlab, who knows how it works

N is for Node a bloatware of code

O is for Objective Pascal, you did not expect that

P is for programming, we all love to do that

Q is for Queries, A database is made

R is for R, statistics are great

S is for Selenium, you have to test that

S is for Smalltalk, let's make it all brief

T is for Turing Test, how human is this?

U is for Unix, build with all talents

V is for Visual Studio, built with all laments

W is for Web, lets build something cool

X is for XHTML, remember all that?

Y is for Y2K, I'm tired as f*ck

Z is for Zip, let's zip is all now.

Get yourself coffee and back to the grind.

Help.

I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.

I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?

I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).

I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.

So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).

And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.

Modern, innovative, cutting edge company seeking XHTML developer...

I've been staffed on a old ongoing project, first day.
0. Compatibility has to be guaranteed down till IE9... ppf.
1. Front end made in XHTML+JS(jQuery)... bah, ok.
2. XHTML+JS is actually generated by PHP5.4, not a line is actually statically served... beh, funny, ok.
3. PHP files are the output of an XSLT transform of a bunch of XMLs... meh, seriously? Oooook.
4. XMLs are the product of the serialisation of a truck of stateful JavaEE6 DTOs populated magically (undocumented) with data coming from a SQL DB... WTF mode!!!
5. Session logics lives within PHP-land at point 2, front end makes ajax calls here that propagates to another WS out of our control that triggers -somehow- (undocumented) our Java backend at point 4 to generate new XMLs and then reach front end again. Kill me now.

Boss: look... it's too slow for the client, it's too heavy on our servers: fix it. Ah, and we sold 85% test coverage by October. You're the man for the job. (I'm a Node.js fullstacker and right now there's not even a testing scaffold, ofc).
Me: prod is on Linux or Windows?
Boss: RHEL7.
Me: rm -rf / as root. Done.
Boss: I know I know...
Me: ...

I think time has come...

Mac: If you try to shoot yourself in the foot, you find out the OS has removed the firing pin from the gun.

Windows: If you try to shoot yourself in the foot, the OS will wrestle you to the ground. You may shoot yourself in the foot, you may shoot yourself in the gut, you may not shoot yourself at all, but they do try.

Linux: If you try and shoot your self in the foot, the OS would like to politely remind you we have *much* bigger guns available - try one if these!

Sometimes I don't know if it's me or the IDE does all the work 😉

As I already said on devrant, I'm a freelance web developer and I also often sell my services for teaching, loving that. Currently I'm teaching PHP with 30 students and it's going very well.

But yesterday, I received an offer for giving another course next month, this time on HTML and CSS, for a company I don't know yet. Almost every line of this email is wrong, outdated by 20 years, or just basically meaningless...

So I thought I could do my best to translate this as close as possible to the original, preserving the wrong formulations too, just for you devranters fellas.

"Hello,

I have an offer for a 2 days course for 5 people (level 1+ and/or 2), on HTML5 and CSS3. Below, the program :

1. XHTML AND CSS2 INTRODUCTION

Advantages and benefits of change

Understanding compatibility for different versions of browsers

HTML, XHTML, CSS edition tools : presentation of the different tools

The CSS language : different types of selectors : class of selector, identifier of selector, contextual selectors, grouped selectors

Blocks of text, boxes of text

The CSS1, CSSP, CSS2 properties

Relative and absolute measures units

2. LAYOUT TECHNIQUES

Full CSS, XHTML websites demo

Positioning with the position property, positioning with the float property

Columns creation

Layout for forms

Layout for data tables

Layout for menus

3. INTRODUCTION TO SVG (SCALABLE VECTOR GRAPHICS)

Role and importance of SVG

Using SVG on client side : basic shapes

SVG structure of document, tags examples

Using CSS styles with SVG

Different integration methods for SVG in a XHTML document

4. OPTIMISATION OF JAVASCRIPT CODE

Introduction to DOM and Javascript

Access to document objects : different access techniques, using this keyword, create elements dynamically

Positioning elements with the help of Javascript : positionning elements relatively to the mouse, move elements

Show/hide elements for creating hierarchical menus

Code optimisation techniques : using objects, objects litterals, loops optimisation

Can you please give me your availability ?"

Seriously...

CSS-fucking-1 ! Is it a course for dinosaurs ?

...And if only my rant was just about the program...

It's totally impossible to cover all these subjects in only 2 days with people of different levels and experience.

The guy exactly said to me : "don't worry about the program, it's an old text but they agreed to it anyway. They just want to learn HTML and CSS, some of them already know it but want to learn more, and the others are total beginers.".

And here is the meaning for the "(level 1+ and/or 2)" part in the email.

So... Surprizingly, I accepted the offer, but asked for at least a 3rd day. I'm waiting for their answer, but I'll do it anyway, adapting the course content to the actual students knowledge. I need the money, after all.

Wish me luck...

It's just sad that these formation companies are selling bullshit to clients that just want to learn something useful. It's too often like that, they sell shitty/useless programs and we have to catch up in real time with students that don't understand why they don't learn what was told to them.

Same as we look at some old pages and see "oh this is unstyled table layout, that is xHTML inline style - it's from the 20th century"

People will look at pages of today in like 20 years and be like "Oh gosh, the material design phase. - oh the apple-blur-copy-cat-phase, oldish HTML5 code, that's from the 2010-20-ies"

Now u can see the difference.
I had to prove why HTML5+XHTML structure is better than non-semantic HTML structure.
Here is the difference.

don't you just love job adverts asking for skills in XHTML

See I'm a curious case.
Back when I graduated high school my father and I started a startup. We build an Android app revolving around personal safety. It was cool. Had news coverage. It flopped.

In the process off the two months time it took me to build the fucker I had to "Learn" Java and the Android SDK enough to push this app out.

I burned myself out and on top of that I felt like I did not really learn the language. So now years later I want to Learn C# for myself for game Development with unity. However I also want to learn Web Development Properly. Which I have tinkered with on and off since the old days of Xhtml when I built a website for my senior project in HS.

I still feel burned out. Anyone else with a similar feel. I know it's silly being burned after one failed project. But it does not help either that I rushed through learning Java did not retain fuck all and now I feel like I can't learn anything new because mental blockage. Even reading this sounds stupid.

Might also be new shiny object syndrome. Between C# and JS. Lol.

XHTML, I had to work on an old project that was developed around it with IE 11 in mind, many bullshit limitations where a hassle, from all the tech, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Developing with workarounds was the norm. Never gonna develop with it.

Do any of you guys who do web development actually use semantic HTML or is it basically the modern xHTML?

I, for one, don't. Old habits die hard

Starting Out In Web Development (again)

The Question

I am looking for some suggestions on tools or frameworks to look into for a hobby project I wanted to try. I have always felt that _time_ is quite interesting so I was going to knock something up to present the current time in a lot of formats (All the ISOs I can find, GPS Time, Week Numbers, Mian Calendars, Metric Time, etc).

My Background

It has been a while since I did anything much with website related bits. Long ago I wrote HTML (4 or XHTML I think) out but hand for simple things. I added a little JavaScript to do a rollover image substitution. At some point I also did some JavaServerPages (JSP).

In the non-web world;
* I am quite good at C & C+
* I am OK with Go, Python, Ruby, BASH
* I can cobble together JavaScript, Java, JSP and a bunch of other things but I will be a bit slow and doing a lot of "online research" to aid me.

-----

Any suggestions are very welcome. Also if you know of similar existing sites I would be interested to see how others have chosen to present things.