Web Developers Are Disconnected

(plus i make courses for them)

This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer.

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[InfiniteQuest]

Next year CS question: What prompt do you give to get the code to pop an array element off the end of an array.

[DosbolErlan]

hey babe, the guy that stretches 2 minutes of content to 20 minutes posted again. i ll be back in 20 minutes

[teslacuil]

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that an API endpoint is just a webpage that writes JSON instead of HTML.

[rrraewr]

Someone in chat mentioned that they have started to hate abstractions and I do feel same. The more I learn, the less do I want a black box package do something for me.

[nox]

As a recent CS graduate, the problem is that we're taught the fundamentals purely as theory, and then made to implement them either using frameworks that completely obfuscate them or using some new language or technique to double up on learning time that ultimately makes it so that you're so focused on figuring out how to make anything work that you don't have the headspace to fully grasp the core concept. Either way, those fundamentals fade into the background, it's like it doesn't exist. And since it has no practical application you can see, it's easy to assume that it's just another bit of assorted info that you learn because its what you're supposed to learn, and not because it's useful. There's no connection, so it's just data floating in a void, waiting to be overwritten by the next subject in the textbook.
Maybe things were just particularly disjointed for me and my year because everyone was trying to readjust to Covid restrictions and then readjust from Covid restrictions afterwards, but it really felt like in every class I was just being taught a bunch of stuff that had next to nothing to do with each other and would get overwhelmed because I was being told to juggle twenty different things at the same time. And then, after I would leave the class feeling like I didn't learn anything, I would look into it more personally, only to realize that it was all interconnected all along, we were just never told that.

[bradleylarkin]

I got so annoyed when i wanted to make my own physics for a first game to learn the workings a few years ago.
I just saw everyone saying no need, just use prebuilt ones in nost videos and forums i was looking through

[ScottLovenberg]

On the back end, do you know how long it took me to realize how important and powerful creating and learning how to use libraries was? I was fully dropped out of college and in my first year of engineering before a lot of the concepts that I knew academically really clicked.

One of my biggest gripes with school is the lack of projects that require you to maintain, document and code with others in any meaningful way. If you have a ball of spaghetti, so long as it runs (for depressing values of "run") by midnight on the deadline, you throw the project away and never really learn what only experience and wisdom can teach. I did have one amazing prof, my advisor, who did semesters with a single project and milestone code deadlines.

Anyways, my point is, there's nothing shameful about being ignorant. We all are to a degree on many things we do every day. There should be shame in not wanting to cure that ignorance. Either way, remaining willfully ignorant is a bad career move.

[Thaleios]

This really hits for me. I'm 50. When I left school in the late 90s, my experience was mostly C, C++ and VMS pascal in my CS program. I had to learn Java 1.0 at my first job because the company wanted a "web presence". I've been an enterprise Java developer/Web Developer for almost 28 years. When I started learning JS, we called it Ecmascript and I used Netscape documentation to learn it originally. Back then, we didn't have frameworks or libraries. We had to write our own components and functions to do what we wanted. That doesn't mean I want to go back to that, but I think it helps you to understand how the things you use work, at least in a way you could explain how it works conceptually.

There are so many things I probably could say but I don't want to sound like some grumpy old man. My advice is if you want to be in this field, you need to have curiosity and a desire to learn new things. If that's not for you, you probably will shortly move onto middle management. In that case, get an MBA as soon as you can. As for me, I'll resist that till the day they take my red stapler from my cold dead hands. 🙂

[ScottHess]

To be fair, web development with baseline tools is already crazy. There are so many points where “Why?” does not have a technical answer at all, it is just that way because because.

[m-ok-]

I had a coworker who almost cried when he found out he had to write CSS without using Bootstrap to deal with issues from our customers who were still using IE-10 customers.

[andreroodt]

This just clicked for me. I never considered that there are actual living programmers who don't know a world other than SPAs. I was so confused when the SPA world got so excited about SSR as though they had just invented something. SSR is all we knew until 2010, starting with Perl/CGI(gulp) in the 90s and moving on to PHP, Python, Java, .Net and Rails.

Many of us transitioned to the backend because we couldn't come to terms with adding another whole MVC to what we already considered as just the View. And then the "Just the View" spawned an entire industry and ecosystem so complex that backend devs stared on in bewilderment. Occasionally, a brave soul would cross the chasm and become a full-stack dev, but most of us got left behind.

This is why HTMX is such a breath of fresh air. It's like an old song on the radio, triggering a memory of the good old days.

[PhotonVideos]

Alternate future: We see the rise of functional-style and system-level programming languages In response to the unmanageable amount of bloat that this next generation is introduced with

[kiseitai]

4:52 Prime is right about this. I have the same approach as him (I go 2 and 5 levels deeper sometimes). Yet, I am an MD and BA Biochem by training. My extend of CS was Python, data structures and algo, bioinformatics, electronics (C), and thesis (bioinformatics/biochem hybrid). My point is, like prime’s, you don’t necessarily need the vanilla full CS experience if you have this kind of learning mindset. CS does help elevate some aspects of my personal understanding of computer systems but it is neither required nor sufficient to be an outstanding engineer.

P.S. as a bonus, you end up using systems better than peers and can pivot between IT, Cybersecurity, traditional development, lead development, and architecture design/systems engineering as needed in your career. Ironically, watching airline crash investigation has done just as much as the CS courses to elevate my programming skills.

[ItzZerooooYK]

Completely shut down the person who tried to say you can only go a level deeper if you learned CS lol. The reality is there are so many resources out there to learn anything tech related, especially for programming. The issue is the majority of people just handicap themselves with frameworks etc.

CS can 100% help you grasp these topics easier, but it doesn't magically bar someone from learning them on their own.

[teJECSke]

the line is at the electrons, you don't have to mess with quarks...

[MasterLJ]

The window of abstraction has always shifted from generation to generation.

Prime, you and I are similarly aged, I'm sure you recall discussions when you were in your 20's with the 50+ year olds that were telling you about system constraints, having to manage the actual pixels on display, 32mb of memory, etc

[sakul_the_one]

9:00 This reminds me, everytime I go again to OS development...

Everytime I come back to the project, I understand more and more.

[vikramprashar]

I love what you talk about in your streams, here's my issue with it. You are right to point out the issue, but the problem is that is what companies are hiring for. They write 5 years of experience for an entry level role with every new framework imaginable. As a software engineer, you are going not going to get hired if you tell them: " I'm taking my time to learn the basics, for web dev I'm going to learn PHP. " If a company wanted to hire for fundamentals, they would test for fundamentals. They wouldn't test for React, or Next.js or any web dev framework.

[djyotta]

One habit I've fallen into is writing without a framework until I end up rolling my own. At that point, I take a step back and ask whether I should be reinventing the wheel or use an existing framework. Nearly always I choose not to use an existing framework but remind myself to KISS and not allow my framework to become too magical. I think a good rule of thumb is if you start preprocessing your code, then you've gone too far.

[nick.smith.mongodb]

2:48 That is one advantages to getting a traditional CS degree from a university. When I was in university, we had to learn assembly and build some basic things with it (randomly generated maze that solves itself, rudimentary USB driver, etc...). Having that understanding of how assembly works really helped to bridge the gap between higher level languages and bare metal. Now I don't think you need to understand assembly to understand Web Dev necessarily, but I think at least a basic understanding of the underlying technologies (hardware, OS, browser, networking...) is essential to properly understand what is going on. I agree with you about it being important to understand at least "1 level deeper"