Always Learning

Ok, so now am I really writing a blog? I don’t know to be honest. This isn’t really a memoir of anything, but I am a firm believer of “know your past to know where you are going”. That’s just what I am thinking about right now. I’m not trying to be provocative or candid, or tell-all. I’m just enjoying writing. It’s more like a diary of how I am still growing.

And squarespace is where I am growing. In the 90’s this would have never occurred to me would have been a reality. I’ve even worked on a lot of variations of squarespace that never got off the ground. Anyways, ever heard of dreamweaver? I started using the program when it was owned by Macromedia. That was my original squarespace.

I have to digress here for a minute and talk about one of the trends back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and that was “WYSIWYG” and “Pixel Perfect“. Those two words are the epitome of cringe for me. So much, that I refuse to use those words anymore.

Not knowing who’s reading this, or their back ground - “What You See Is What You Get” and “Pixel Perfect” straight up have lost me jobs. Those two phrases have never met the a web-browser, pixel depth, Internet Exploder, polyfills, tables, horrible box models and flash font rendering. BTW Internet Exploder is not a typo. The whole “Explorer“ paradigm is still the greatest single failure of IT security ever. Who in their right mind decided that networked computers should also use an insecure TCP/IP stack tightly coupled with control over your entire file system should have had their head examined. Head like a hole.

And please, don’t get me started with email or ftp. Those standards should be EOL’ed permanently. The fact they exist at all is beyond me at this point.

Oh yeah, the pain of making things pixel perfect. I have literally lost jobs by people who sold pixel perfect UI designs and I could not deliver on them because it was impossible. Not just hard, or impractical - hard things are hard - I can do hard. But for the longest time, and I guess even now the expectation of technology is to be perfect above all costs. Go look at the CSS 1.x standard - and then compare that with Mosaic. Wow. It gets even worse when we talk about all the variations, on all the things.

Y’know, I guess there is a point here - getting to pixel perfect, et al really forced me to learn the Document Object Model and all of the trappings of CSS and HTML. One thing that DW gave me, was insight into everything that was available in the HTML spec. I really felt like I had a leg up, with code intelligence at that point. When flex and grid came out, I was like: cool, that’s now easier than cobbling together disparate and block vs. inline elements, th,tr,td, float, clears, blah blah blah.

The problem being that anything you made in Dreamweaver at the time was at best a good starting point. I haven’t thought about this for a really long time, but I guess it also taught me the value of browser testing.

I was so stinking proud of the first website I made in geocities, that all I cared about was the reaction people would have: “Oh this is great, you’re so cool buddy“ - ugh. I know you can’t see my eyes rolling in the back of my head, but hey are; rest assured.

Then, boom. Internet Explorer, site exploded. Fail. Safari Too, Netscape, Firefox and whatever other boutique web browser the inevitable client who was paying you used. And forget mobile, that was a whole other world of pain and suffering. Remember, I was testing on a 14400 baud modem and AOL.

I realized the title of my next blog post is going to be “all the variations, on all the things”. And by that, I mean learning all the variations on all the vendors. I mean it’s still hard core today, but back then the specs were so stinking opaque that one had to test everything on multiple devices, because there were no services for this stuff.

The big takeaway from this post is that from 1997-2017 most of my application development was done on platforms that required so much just to get to a delivery, that I learned all the things. They’re still in my head. (Also, I got to use high-speed internet called roadrunner pretty early on in ‘97)

From about 2017-2022 - I was on cruise control, give it to me and I could just get it done. Now that 2024 is here, I feel like there are many things now I am learning all over again. I had to start all over in a few ways, because hiring is so different. You were lucky if someone knew their email and what an IPsec tunnel was, but now hiring is all about fundamentals. Which is cool, but daunting.

I don’t believe I’m an old dog learning new tricks. I know the tricks, I am learning how to express them again in a world where folks for the most part know the fundamentals, or at least have been taught the human language to use. I haven’t used much of that in a decade.

So, for now I am having a wonderful time with Algo Monster to help me with Leet tests. And, I wonder how many people actually know about 1337 - cause that’s what I grew up with.

It’s late on a Friday, so signing off, don’t code tired!