Mastodawn

Julia Evans Dec 19, 2024

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)

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Jan Lehnardt

Dec 19, 2024

@b0rk from online tutorials and the php documentation in ~2000.

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Ben Ramsey Dec 20, 2024

@janl @b0rk I sometimes think if I were starting out now, it might be much more difficult.

Back in the day, it was easy-peasy: shared hosting with PHP, database, and FTP access. I’d just upload files, see what worked and what broke, rinse, repeat.

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Julia Evans Dec 20, 2024

@ramsey @janl i'm not sure I'll ever understand the "it was so easy to develop with PHP + FTP" thing, it kind of feels like you had to be there

(it sounds hard to me, like developing with no version control?? no push to deploy? no local dev environment?)

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Alerta! Alerta!

@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....

/cc @ramsey @janl