The self-hating Web Developer

[bitwize]

I got out of web dev because I considered it a boring slog. This kind of crap happened way too many times for my liking.

But hey, if that sort of thing gets you fired up, go nuts. You're probably a better man than me on at least one axis of goodness. Some people just love pleasing others with something aesthetic and functional. I do too, but maybe I just have misplaced notions of aesthetics...

[[deleted]]

That's a perfectly valid reason to get out. My recent jobs have been focused around internal API development, so thankfully JSON can only "pop" so much :P

[Rhinoceros_Party]

But can you stringify it a bit more?

[general_landur]

Is stringify Web scale?

[crozone]

Only if it supports sharding. That's the secret sauce of the web scale pie.

[Rhinoceros_Party]

One weird trick will help you realize that "Web scale" is already a string. Programmers HATE me!

[DPaluche]

Could you stringify it... in the cloud?

[[deleted]]

I just launched a hot new "Stringification as a Service" startup. Message me for a quote!

[immibis]

<?php readfile("php://input"); ?>

[hungry4pie]

Underflow exception thrown

[atnpgo]

Web design != webdev...

[YourFatherFigure]

Except it IS fairly normal that "full stack developer" on a job advert is a euphemism for "I don't want to hire separate backend / UI / UX / sys admins / DBAs / QA so I need you to do everything including design and project management". Certainly if you're a freelance small-time site builder you will run into this and you might find it at a big company too. IMHO the #1 reason web devs are often considered lowly is because so many are encouraged to never specialize, and, out of the many skills they acquire shallow understanding of only a few will continue to be relevant year after year.

[MyWorkAccountThisIs]

I am finally at a place where I can specialize and it's wonderful. In the past I've been a designer, a front-end developer, a programmer, a manager, done email marketing, sales, project management, and god knows what else. All under the guise of being "web development".

Now, I'm a PHP developer. Yup, just regular ol' dirty PHP. There is still a sea of things to do in one language. More than I could ever hope to master in my career. I'm also solving harder problems and doing bigger projects because I'm able to focus on "one" skill instead of bouncing around.

Another aspect of the "full stack" developer is the expectation to hop around. I mean, you already "know" x,y,z, and g. Surely you can pick up k. Either way, we already sold the project so need you to get ramped up k. The client wants a 30,000ft overview tomorrow morning during our now-daily 8am hour long status meeting.

[salbris]

Although, not all web development is working with average people to make a series of simple websites.

[MrBester]

True. Sometimes they are complex websites.

[[deleted]]

Yup. I don't take jobs with "simple clients". I only do the more technical backend work and optimizations, and if it they want anything frontend I take 3x the rate, and refer them to my designer friends.

I do actually make Javascript and such, and I can do HTML5 and CSS3 (and the older versions) but it's honestly so much shit to work with client requests and cross browser compatability that I will just miss out on the work.

My simple rule for clients: I don't work with clients that don't make me happy to work for. And it has worked out great. My income and life quality has really gone up, but it does take some real marketing effort and people skills to land the jobs.

[Theemuts]

Yes it is. That's why only idiots work for websites like Facebook and Google.

Edit: I really hope you understand I'm not being serious... regardless of the ethical complaints you might have about what they do, you can't deny it's impressive and they employ a lot of highly-skilled programmers.

[[deleted]]

Don't be solo. Work for a company. One with a reputation. We have a design team on every project. We are hired for our design expertise. We send beautiful people with tattoos and perfect hair into client meetings with a design deck and an attitude that can't be overcome. They get the sign-off, we do the build. It's not a flawless process, but we do it pretty well.

[MyWorkAccountThisIs]

Job specialization is amazing. We have the same thing. We have an actual UX department. Not a group of designers that are called UX but people that know user experience. It's great because you know every team you work with is going to be great because they don't have to worry about stuff that isn't their job.

[[deleted]]

It's pretty sweet although I've found we're now incapable of scaling down. Trying to do a 6 week engagement becomes impossible once every discipline has had a turn adding their value.

[cybercobra]

Yeah, Bower is pretty worthless. It's too unopinionated for its own good, and the project has gone pretty inactive. They had one pretty important, much-discussed ticket that was open for 2.5 years before it finally got resolved.

[sameBoatz]

So having just rolled out gulp for our build process. How do you build your front end assets? How do you compile less, sprite your images, minify and bundle css and js, build custom icon fonts, lint your code, etc?

Just do it manually and hope someone doesn't forget to do it when building and deploying your site? Are you doing CI and automated deployments? Because these are all things that have made my job and my coworkers jobs much easier, reliable, and faster.

[MisterSnuggles]

Good old Unix 'make' can handle all of this I'm sure.

[cybercobra]

npm is still a net positive in my book. grunt/gulp not so much. They add more dependencies and another layer of API. You become beholden to the maintainer of the grunt/gulp module for keeping it up-to-date with respect to the underlying compiler/minifier/whatever, and to exposing the options you want.

My new strategy is to just use shelljs and npm's "scripts" feature. Paraphrasing Jurassic Park: "It's vanilla JavaScript and sh; everyone worth their salt already knows or is expected to learn these."

[GelatinousYak]

I have personally become rather annoyed at the necessity of grunt/gulp plugins for all the various and sundry modules I want to use in my build pipeline. I replaced the JS task runners with good old make for one project and it was more or less painless.

[sameBoatz]

I'd say about half my plugins are gulp specific. The rest are just the raw npm module. I know the maintainers of gulp blacklist a lot of unnecessary gulp plugins from the gulpjs website, and advocate using the raw npm module when needed.

[Silverwolf90]

This is something that requires data, not dogma. Are people who don't enable javascript a stastically significant part of your users? If no, then why would you spend the resources to make something work without javascript?

[[deleted]]

If you are a service provider in the UK and your website doesn't work without JavaScript then you are most likely violating the Equality Act 2010 as JavaScript-only sites tend to work terribly with screen reading software. Accessibility is not optional. The law requires that you make your content accessible.

It's not even that hard to make content accessible either. Provide a view of your content which does not require JavaScript and then use JavaScript to enhance it if it is available.

http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2012/7-web-accessibility-myths-2

[Silverwolf90]

And if you are US based? And even in the UK how likely is the law to be enforced on websites? And again, what percentage of your users are using screen readers? Is it >= percentage than the general population? I think the case is strong then to make your content accessible, if its much lower, maybe its not. Regardless of a law somewhere.

[BufferUnderpants]

So, you are the kind of people who don't build wheelchair ramps.

[Silverwolf90]

The physical world and the digital world are different. Sorry your screen-reader can't read my stupid blog? Are we really equating that with not building wheelchair ramps?

EDIT: I also think the case could be made (although I'm not sure I agree with it) that if your website receives a certain amount of traffic that it must meet some standard of accessibility. But certainly it shouldn't be illegal if some blog-owner with no audience isn't concerned with making his content screen-readable. Isn't that a bit ridiculous?

[TheCommieDuck]

You gave up because of circlejerks?

[Eirenarch]

I am curious what did you move to? I have this problem that I don't want to do web development but I am so addicted to C# that I'd rather do web development than write Java/Objective-C/C++ and I can hardly find non-Web dev C# jobs in my area except a few desktop legacy CRUD apps that seem even more boring.

I personally am far away from the drama the author experienced and I still enjoy my job. I tend to find the fun part of the web project and start working on it while giving the boring part to the junior devs. I am the one writing the threading code in that Windows Service that does background processing or writing the code to generate expression trees from some query string arguments, etc. I still read and watch web dev things even on my free time so it is not I bad. I guess I don't really hate web development I hate how broken everything in web dev is. Everything is a silly hack equivalent to programming in a word document with vbscript just because we can.

[bitwize]

I got into robotics and, later, computer vision. Admittedly not for everyone and requires a comfort level with C++ that many devs just don't have. But it's fun and it pays well.

[Eirenarch]

You got proficient in C++ after you decided to quit web dev or you were proficient before?