Web Developers Are Disconnected

hey babe, the guy that stretches 2 minutes of content to 20 minutes posted again. i ll be back in 20 minutes

Next year CS question: What prompt do you give to get the code to pop an array element off the end of an array.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that an API endpoint is just a webpage that writes JSON instead of HTML.

Someone in chat mentioned that they have started to hate abstractions and I do feel same. The more I learn, the less do I want a black box package do something for me.

As a recent CS graduate, the problem is that we're taught the fundamentals purely as theory, and then made to implement them either using frameworks that completely obfuscate them or using some new language or technique to double up on learning time that ultimately makes it so that you're so focused on figuring out how to make anything work that you don't have the headspace to fully grasp the core concept. Either way, those fundamentals fade into the background, it's like it doesn't exist. And since it has no practical application you can see, it's easy to assume that it's just another bit of assorted info that you learn because its what you're supposed to learn, and not because it's useful. There's no connection, so it's just data floating in a void, waiting to be overwritten by the next subject in the textbook. Maybe things were just particularly disjointed for me and my year because everyone was trying to readjust to Covid restrictions and then readjust from Covid restrictions afterwards, but it really felt like in every class I was just being taught a bunch of stuff that had next to nothing to do with each other and would get overwhelmed because I was being told to juggle twenty different things at the same time. And then, after I would leave the class feeling like I didn't learn anything, I would look into it more personally, only to realize that it was all interconnected all along, we were just never told that.

To be fair, web development with baseline tools is already crazy. There are so many points where “Why?” does not have a technical answer at all, it is just that way because because.

This really hits for me. I'm 50. When I left school in the late 90s, my experience was mostly C, C++ and VMS pascal in my CS program. I had to learn Java 1.0 at my first job because the company wanted a "web presence". I've been an enterprise Java developer/Web Developer for almost 28 years. When I started learning JS, we called it Ecmascript and I used Netscape documentation to learn it originally. Back then, we didn't have frameworks or libraries. We had to write our own components and functions to do what we wanted. That doesn't mean I want to go back to that, but I think it helps you to understand how the things you use work, at least in a way you could explain how it works conceptually. There are so many things I probably could say but I don't want to sound like some grumpy old man. My advice is if you want to be in this field, you need to have curiosity and a desire to learn new things. If that's not for you, you probably will shortly move onto middle management. In that case, get an MBA as soon as you can. As for me, I'll resist that till the day they take my red stapler from my cold dead hands. 🙂

I got so annoyed when i wanted to make my own physics for a first game to learn the workings a few years ago. I just saw everyone saying no need, just use prebuilt ones in nost videos and forums i was looking through

On the back end, do you know how long it took me to realize how important and powerful creating and learning how to use libraries was? I was fully dropped out of college and in my first year of engineering before a lot of the concepts that I knew academically really clicked. One of my biggest gripes with school is the lack of projects that require you to maintain, document and code with others in any meaningful way. If you have a ball of spaghetti, so long as it runs (for depressing values of "run") by midnight on the deadline, you throw the project away and never really learn what only experience and wisdom can teach. I did have one amazing prof, my advisor, who did semesters with a single project and milestone code deadlines. Anyways, my point is, there's nothing shameful about being ignorant. We all are to a degree on many things we do every day. There should be shame in not wanting to cure that ignorance. Either way, remaining willfully ignorant is a bad career move.

the line is at the electrons, you don't have to mess with quarks...