I don't know if it's possible to get a good answer to this but: if you learned how to make websites with, like, users who can login and do things where the website stores stuff in a database, without doing it as a job, how did you do it?
I feel like in principle I know all of the basic pieces (HTTP, HTML, CSS, SQL, CORS, various programming languages, etc), but also somehow it still feels extremely hard to me
(no more replies please there are enough)
You would have to give that user subsequent administrative rights/ access.
Yep, that’s me as well. I taught myself as teenager when I was in secondary school.
Even after school I didn’t want to do this as a career, but studied physics and chemistry. Tried for over a year to get a job in that field without success before I considered doing software development as a job. Sent out a single application for a job as web developer, got offered that job, and decided it must be a sign.
That was 20 years ago. And I’m still doing software development.
FWIW, my kid (11) is super interested and is teaching himself all the same stuff in much the same way.
First JS/html/css, then Kotlin. Now he’s spent the last few days battling with a raspberry pi to set up a SQL server, and is determined to learn sql.
But not sure that alone will lead to a professional career: he’ll have to study something related if he still wants to pursue this as a career in a few years time …
@ramsey @wez @janl @b0rk It is impossible to overstate the extent to which today’s common web stacks are designed for solving Facebook and Google’s problems. Everything is so complex in part because the tools have been architected for a scale and context that is irrelevant to nearly every project that uses them.
We’re all subsidizing the biggest companies in the world.
@b0rk 😂 Yeah. "designers version control" with .bak and .bak.bak, a "local" dev environment with an editor directly accessing files via FTP, var_dump debugging on prod and when you were serious, your stage was just in a different folder....
Deoendency management? DB migrations? CORS? CSP? XSS? what's that?
It was slightly different than today. And shows how much we take for granted within one generation....
@Hipska @b0rk @ramsey @janl Also, don't forget there was no package managers, no compilation steps, etc.
At best, you use PEAR to add packages and it was inlcuded in the source folder you uploaded. Just update the code and refresh the browser and you got an error, or not. Worst of all, a white screen.
Heck, you often didn't even have logs! Certainly none you wrote to yourself, it just wasn't a thing. If you were lucky you had access to the PHP logs for your vhost.
@b0rk It kinda became a job, but wasn't when I read Learn Python the Hard Way and Two Scoops of Django.
I think I get what you say about knowing the constituent parts... "but then what?!". I guess the way to go is to not be so concerned with all the nitty-gritty stuff (until you actually *need* that depth). Like, why design authentication from the ground-up when you get it for free with $FRAMEWORK?
@b0rk I want to add that I think the web dev beat is very very very hard to follow. So many new things, like, say, "what's bun even? do I need it?"
The fact that I'm struggling to concisely describe what I'm confused about is very telling. But basically JS build pipelines. Wanted to call it "frontend code", but there's stuff like SvelteKit and Nuxt now so that's actually not true...
Luckily I'm not in the customer-facing end of things but I tend to stick with htmx/alpine for web2.0 behavior
@b0rk I bang my head against things until something happens. Databases are scary so I dealt with MongoDB first...then ran into issues so I moved to RethinkDB because it had a UI where I can see my data if I fuck up. Ran into issues with an ORM so I moved to EdgeDB. They have an actual business model and also have a UI and are fantastic.
I hate SQL. I'm a person, not a computer. I'm not learning that syntax, ever. I steadfastly REFUSE.
EdgeDB is great, I'm a fanboy for life.
If I remember correctly, my first non-work site that enabled login and content edit was PHP and CouchDB (that is, a document database) which enabled reasonable content submissions and update and whatnot, simple user accounts (documents…) and basically “easy” starts… this was a reasonable way to learn about the things that would be easier if __ and so on.
Not secure, not something I would hold up as an example, but a good learning experience for me.
Almost right after was work PHP+PG…
(I haven´t used PHP for anything since, this was around 2005)
@b0rk I made a bunch of websites with Django. It's great that it gives you all of that infrastructure for free, but I still had to read a lot of tutorials to understand basic concepts.
I think what makes it hard is there are just _so many_ pieces that have to come together to make a complete website on that stack.
@b0rk started with only javascript, then learned perl and how to use it as a cgi-script using the file system for storage, then learned about postgresql, then learned about frameworks like django, then got into node.js where you implement the entire server (the most fun!)
it was a very roundabout but inclusive journey for me that happened at the same time as learning to program. if you're learning it now, you can probably take a much more focused and effective approach.
@b0rk Way back when I first made dynamic sites (for my own entertainment, back in like 1998), things were simpler. It was mostly perl, with html sprinkled on top, and a very basic understanding of http.
I learned how to write CGI scripts in Perl from the scripts shared by people on the IRC channels I hung out on, and from various Perl man pages. Perl man pages were fantastic resources.
They were very bad scripts, mind you. Every single line of them could be shown today as an example how not to do things. But! They got the job done at the time.
@b0rk I bought a PHP book I saw at Barnes & Noble, and worked through it end-to-end, drawing from php.net as I went.
https://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Web-Development-Second/dp/067232525X
Then a webcomic artist friend asked me to write a website for them!
Well, I wanted something done. For me this "I want it, and I believe I can get there, even through sweat and tears and everything" is like the best learning experience.
Then try, think, read and talk to other people who are slightly farther on the journey. That's what worked for me.
And do it step by step. Test after every step. Understand every step. Don't take shortcuts unless you really understand them.
That's MHO.
@b0rk I dicked around with CGI scripts in Uni back in the day. But to be fair, best practices then were far removed from what one needs to do today. Certainly no CORS or anything like that!
I brought myself up to speed with what's needed for a Modern web app professionally. Funnily enough, it was bringing a legacy CGI-based app up to speed with modern best practices.
@b0rk I don't quite understand (not a job throws me off)
my first web site was on uni lan me doing my first thing with python (very old python)
[totally forgot about server side of web for years]
develop new web site with user auth from scratch; I knew about saltcrypt pw, no idea about cors or csrf back then (had to look up csrf because something warned about it.)
I can't tell what feels hard, making it user friendly or making it secure, or something other.
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