What I learned from being a web developer for 17 years | Hacker News Reader

What I learned from being a web developer for 17 years

community.risingstack.com

76 pointssecondary16 comments

Come on, autoplayed videos? Just respect your readers. I have my music in my headphones. I'm not going to read your website if you don't respect me. No, changing my browser with some autoplay-disabling-plugin doesn't convince me to read what you wrote.

Yea, I know that most probably the author won't read it :)

Give him another 17 years and he might learn some basics.

I must write such an article on my blog. Some clickable title like "37 things I have learned during the last 37 years"...

The list would be quite short:

- use Postgres - don't irritate your readers (e.g. with autoplay videos, sounds, making accounts to read anything) - make the page lite (with terribly small usage of javascript)

(then repeat the above 12 times) and the final thing would be:

- just read some books about programming, learn KISS, YAGNI, DI, OFA (other funny abbreviations) - and use it

- set aside a time after every iOS release to retest the frontend because apple will have broken some part of the standard in amusing and hilarious ways.

I didn't get anything autoplaying. Are you referring to the embedded YouTube video? I wonder if that's a flag in the embedded image, or just a browser quirk?

I've hit this situation a few times in the past couple of years:

Work done from 2000-2005... someone emails me and says "hey, this isn't working now".

In all 3 cases, I was flummoxed that these systems were still in use, and had been for years. There was a big mixture of shame and pride. Shame - code wasn't as good as it could have been, although I do remember why some corners were cut (time/budget usually, although "lack of knowledge" hit now and then), but it was also early styling of MVC - things were fairly separated, easy to locate where changes should be made, etc.

These were all PHP4 projects, and after upgrades to PHP 5.5 or 5.6 (or other server changes) something wasn't working. That this code worked for ... 12-14 years without being touched was... again, both a bit scary, but also a decent point of pride.

I'm not sure you can really truly appreciate that sort of "man, this code might be functioning for a LONG time - like, a decade or more" feeling when you're, say, 23. You simply don't have the frame of reference. Not saying you can't write good, solid, dependable, future-proof systems at 23, but I don't think it should be a given, either.

EDIT: Put another way, having to deal with your own code from 10+ years ago is both an extremely educational and humbling experience, and I think developers need to go through it. However, you can't really have that experience until you've done it for more that 10 years.

I have disabled auto play, so, tldr:

- history likes to repeat itself and the tech industry is prime for another crash.

- therefore be flexible

- just because you can doesn't mean you should jump on a latest fashionable JS framework bandwagon

- dry principle

20 years web dev here, pretty much agree with everything the author wrote. Exactly my experience and conclusions.

10 years of experience webdev here - I agree with most of the stuff author wrote there.

bash javascript but the ad shown on the left told me : "time to become a node hero". How ironic.

I didn't see where javascript was bashed?

lots of personal historical and unneeded info he got there

Autoplay videos and loads of blocked elements from Ublock - no thanks. Seems he learned nothing.

bit disappointed he never learned how annoying autoplay videos are...

And in all that time he didn't learn that autoplay videos are a pox and no one wants to sign up for your fucking newsletter.

Not only did I scroll down far enough that I didn't know where the video was playing from, but as soon as I found it and hit pause the full-screen sign up modal popped up. So I guess I got about two paragraphs in before I closed the tab.

30 years experience web dev here, probably much more successful than the author and everyone else in this thread.

Fully agree with the author here. 10/10

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