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)

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

@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.

@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?)

@b0rk @ramsey @janl Worth noting: the version control *sucked* back then. We take a lot of that for granted now because it works so much better, despite being much more complex.
@sean @b0rk @ramsey very good point. I once spent a week(!) merging two branches in SVN.