Hello

[Gary-SC]

Hi,

I'm looking forward to learning more. In Digital Point Forum, Jason rescued me from all kinds of misinformation. I'm still relatively new to web development, but I've already discovered that the "highway robbery approach" to web development is unbelievably common.  It makes me angry! CutCodeDown has been my go-to reference when it comes to HTML/CSS, minimalist semantic markup, and even how to think in general. 

[ian]

Hi Gary, it is surprising how easy it is to get tangled up in this coding malarky, especially with all the rubbish information available at the click of a button.

I'm sure that you'll be able to help others to keep things simple.

[Jason Knight]

I'm sure that you'll be able to help others to keep things simple.

Thing is, the way he took to it once the concepts were explained, Gary reminds me so much of Dan Schulz. A year or two he'll make me look like a rank amateur, come back and start teaching me stuff.

[ian]

Thing is, the way he took to it once the concepts were explained, Gary reminds me so much of Dan Schulz. A year or two he'll make me look like a rank amateur, come back and start teaching me stuff.

That's the way it should be - standing on shoulders.

[Gary-SC]

Hi Gary, it is surprising how easy it is to get tangled up in this coding malarky, especially with all the rubbish information available at the click of a button.

...And, I get a lot of rubbish advice even from some of the devs at my intern job. Just the other day, it went like this:

Sr. dev: "We are going to use Bootstrap for our new site template."

Me: "Why not write it from scratch? I can do that so you won't have to, and it's faster for me to do it than using Bootstrap. Besides, Bootstrap is bloated, and it encourages bad practices, and..."

Sr. dev: "I appreciate your enthusiasm, and I agree with you. But, our devs need a standardized CSS library to make it easier to work with various templates across the site."

Me: "A simple in-house style guide should do the trick if you must have one. But, I can write simple stuff, and I don't even think you need it."

Sr. dev: "Well, again, it's hard to maintain stuff when it's not standardized and documented well."

Me: "... What do you mean? I don't write anything outside the standard HTML/CSS."

Sr. dev: "Well, I appreciate your input, but this is what we are going to do as a team. As an intern, I think it will be good for you as a learning assignment. You know the basics. You'll do just fine with Bootstrap. You don't always need to do custom stuff."

Me: "......." (sigh)

They sometimes leave me with a massive confusion as a result of this type of illogical "persuasion." CutCodeDown is one place where things make sense. 

[Jason Knight]

... and you really just hit upon the bald faced LIE of the idiocy of front-end frameworks. There's a lot of BS involved, but the biggest one is the "good for collaboration" claim that isn't based in ANY way in reality.

HOW are the standards of using HTML properly, maintaining separation of concern, leveraging semantics, and all the other good practices "bad for working as a team" or any worse than the class-soup DIV-soup specificity HELL of bootcrap?

Dimes to dollars your BOSS at this internship isn't even qualified to write HTML much less direct those doing so. He's bought into the LIES of bootcrap and now will defend them to the hilt, no matter how much it basically screws over their entire company and every one of their clients.

He's making everyone work five times harder, based on nothing but the fact that he's bought into the lies and propaganda of these derpy frameworks and the snake oil peddling fanboys of same.

[Gary-SC]

Thing is, the way he took to it once the concepts were explained, Gary reminds me so much of Dan Schulz. A year or two he'll make me look like a rank amateur, come back and start teaching me stuff.

No way!  The more I learn, the more I realize how much I do NOT know. I love learning this stuff, and I hope to get better every day. But, I now realize that it might end up being life-long learning.

I am HORRIFIED to look at my posts at Digital Point Forums now, but I'm glad I posted them because they show me that I am making at least some progress in my understanding. I feel like a different person, to be honest.

The unfortunate side effect, though, is that I get angry more often because I realize more and more that there is just so much highway robbery going on out there. Even after a few months of being exposed to all kinds of craziness by my first "mentor" at my other job and some of the forum posters advocating against good work ethics, I am still appalled whenever I see someone selling a web design service for $2,000+, and all he does is to pick a pre-made template (often Bootcrap), "customize" it (a.k.a. changing a few parameters) and calling it a "custom job." I've even seen it done at my current intern job. And not to mention "SEO service" one of their clients got from some marketing agency earlier this month. I was asked to get involved, so I got to see how they did their stuff. I saw the invoice, and it was somewhere around $7,000, and all they were doing was mainly a bunch of fiddling with a few customized Bootcrap templates for what they called "a/b testing" and fiddling with Google Search Console.

But, I digress. :p

[Jason Knight]

But, I now realize that it might end up being life-long learning.

Embrace that feeling, it's an indication you have what it takes to become one of the "Greats". If you look at my "Advice on learning to program" thread, you'll see that "There is no end to the learning" is one of the major sections. This is not something you learn once and then be set for life. The people who treat it like that are the ones usually vomiting up such junk code.

I am HORRIFIED to look at my posts at Digital Point Forums now, but I'm glad I posted them because they show me that I am making at least some progress in my understanding. I feel like a different person, to be honest.

This too is the mark of a GOOD programmer. If you're not disgusted with your own work of just a year prior, you might just be in the wrong field. Because this is a process of "always learning" it means how you used to do things might not have been the best way of doing it, sometimes horrifically so. That's just the nature of the beast, and the only ones who don't see it that way are the sleazy fly-by-night scammers.

Your ability to push aside the propaganda and bandwagon, question things, accept answers that have facts instead of feeling behind them, and to be self critical are all the marks of a GOOD developer.