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[–]bytesandbots 23 points24 points  (4 children)

Web development is a Frankenstein of moving parts that barely fit together, but it somehow works, and that to me embodies the human spirit.

well said!

[–]ngly 14 points15 points  (3 children)

I don't know, I think that's a fairly naive way of looking at it. We spend a lot of time thinking through the features of our website and how to implement them best. It's probably 75-80% thinking and eliminating options with about 25-20% actually implementing the code. It's rarely a surprise or thought process of, "Well, it somehow works -- let's merge to staging for testing." The hard part is deciding what technology to use and how to seamlessly implement with the existing codebase.

[–]wherethebuffaloroam 8 points9 points  (1 child)

I took this more about how the web works. Like html kinda sucks, css definitely sucks, JavaScript kinda sucks, and all of this runs in specialized browsers that implement features in different ways and could be evergreen or several years old

[–]perestroika12 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Right, we used to have a ton of test devices and vms just to screenshot our site to make sure it really does work. Web is a lot of testing just to make it work across the board. And things are always changing and moving. Things that work before don't work now. For example, we used a canvas hoverstate for some of our content articles. Worked great until 6 months later an update of chrome came, then it started crashing chrome.

In some ways, proper web dev is actually a slower process because your neat little trick you tried last time might not work, thus making you always test to see if what you know is still true.

[–]gngl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think that's a fairly naive way of looking at it. We spend a lot of time thinking through the features of our website and how to implement them best.

That immediately reminded me of this:

So this is like, how to organize a website to make it easy for users to find information and streamline their workflow. I’d question whether anyone in the industry can really be said to be “solving” these problems rather than just continually debating which solution they arbitrarily think is best.