jeremyparker

My journey was Windows-> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch.

(Infuriatingly i still use windows for gaming, but nothing else.)

Did i mention that i use arch?

More importantly:

fucked up all my data with no backup.

One time i messed up a script and accidentally copied 40,000 mp3s to the same filename. 20 years of music collecting, literally going back to Napster, all gone.

Well, not completely gone. I've got everything uploaded to iBroadcast, and I'm pretty sure i can download my library. But I'm not sure i deserve to.

HTML is pretty straightforward so just understanding the very basic stuff is probably all you need. CSS is where html gets any challenge it might have.

CSS is weird because it's very "easy" so "real developers" kind of object to learning it, but the truth is, if you gave any of them a layout design, they probably couldn't build it. There are tools like tailwind to help, but, IMO, tailwind just helps you avoid learning css's vocabulary, but you just replace it with having to learn tailwind's vocabulary.

JavaScript on the other hand is a "real" programming language, though decidedly quick-n-dirtier than other languages. It lets you be a lot more sloppy. (Tbh it's a lot more forgiving than css!). As a result, it lacks the elegance and control that "real developers" like -- and, as most people's first language, it lets newcomers get into bad habits. For these reasons, JavaScript is a bit derided -- but, unlike CSS, most developers can't avoid it.

There are a few key ideas in JavaScript that, once you understand them, things make a lot more sense. (I won't get into them now, since it doesn't sound like you're at the point where that kind of clarity would help, but, when you are, come on back here and make a post!)

TLDR: HTML is definitely something you can just pick up along the way. JavaScript is a real language that will take a little while to feel comfortable with, and it will take a career to master. CSS will never be easy, so don't let it hold you back.

I dated a girl named Password for a while. She was a lot older than me, she was born in the year 1234.

Anyway, @op the exact same thing happened to me. I gotta get smarter about opsec.

Follow up question -- I'm not OP but I'm another not-really-new developer (5 years professional xp) that has 0 experience working with others:

I have trouble understanding where to go on the spectrum of "light touch" and "doing a really good job". (Tldr) How should a contributor gauge whether to make big changes to "do it right" or to do it a little hacky just to get the job done?

For example, I wanted to make a dark mode for a site i use, so i pulled the sites's repo down and got into it.

The CSS was a mess. I've done dark modes for a bunch of my own projects, and I basically just assign variables (--foreground-color, --background-color), and then swap their assignments by the presence or absence of a ".dark-mode" class in the body tag.

But the site had like 30 shades of every color, like, imperceptibly different shades of red or green. My guess was the person used a color picker and just eyeballed it.

If the site was mine, I would normalize them all but there was such a range -- some being more than 10-15% different from each other -- so i tried to strike a balance in my normalization. I felt unsure whether this was done by someone who just doesn't give a crap about color/CSS or if it was carefully considered color selection.

My PR wasn't accepted (though the devs had said in discord that i could/should submit a PR for it). I don't mind that it wasn't accepted, but i just don't know why. I don't want to accidentally step on toes or to violate dev culture norms.

Me: Oh, I get it, this "Lemmy" website -- it's like The Onion but for nerds?

My fellow lemmings: No, they're serious. run0 is real.

Me: Hah. The Onion, but for nerds! I love it.

Copy designs you like, and keep a couple of CSS files +/- web components that you can carry along with you from project to project. Tweak then as you go.

Like everything else, getting good at making designs that you like will take time and effort, so if you want you get good at it, do it! I find it fun, and my designs aren't to everyone's taste (I too like black tshirts), but whatever.

Plus, getting good at making designs that i like has made me better at making designs clients/projects will like, so, win/win.

Literally a children's hospital in my city had their shit locked up by "hackers" -- they were using pen and paper to schedule appointments for weeks, using handwritten notes to pass health details from ER to ICU, etc. It could still be down for all i know, I haven't checked in a while.

I don't know exactly how much pain and suffering this has caused kids, or how many died because of it, but i know how hard it was when my son was in the hospital for months when he was little, and that was with a fully functional hospital.

It's fucking disgusting. And I'm like kinda pro-crime a lot of the time...

Unfortunately an economic system is only as useful as its buy-in, and that's the hard part. If you want you fight financial hegemony, don't give wealthy people another lever of control.

It's hard enough to get people on board with social movements that directly help them and have no downsides; you're going to have a hard time promulgating a financial system that undermines the wealth of the people who dominate the standard financial system, especially when the more wealth you've accumulated (in the standard system) is directly proportional to your ability to spread propaganda to support your wealth.

There are better, more winnable, battles to fight than the global financial system.

While i agree that a victory there would be huge, part of the reason it would be so huge is because of how very, very unwinnable it is.

That said, if you're super stuck on finance as the issue you want you be involved with, imo, the best thing you can do is communicate the questions -- the problems with contemporary finance, of which there are so very many -- and don't waste your time offering solutions.

(Even if we had a solution that could work, it would surely be obsolete by the time it could be meaningfully implemented. Cryptos of all kinds, at this point, can only provide their benefits to people with disposable wealth, who can afford to take the risk, and those are exactly the people who don't need you to fight for their interests. Or anyone -- but you're not anyone, you are you; your energy is finite, spend it where it can help the people who need it most.)

jQuery is a lot smaller and less nebulous than its competitors (looking at you,~~React~~ literally every JavaScript framework).

Jquery was what was popular when i learned js. I'm kinda glad it was, honestly: jQuery is a little unique in that it doesn't have magic to it the way js frameworks do. Everything you can do in jQuery, you can do in vanilla JavaScript pretty easily. With, say, React, how is a newcomer supposed to understand how a series of React components become HTML?

So jQuery kept it "real" for me. Fewer abstractions between me and the HTML meant it was easier for me to connect the dots as a self taught developer.

As for how it's changed, it's more any how vanilla JavaScript has changed. A lot of the things that made jQuery so much easier and cleaner than vanilla are now baked in, like document.querySelector(), element.classList, createElement(), addEventListener()... It had Ajax methods that, before jQuery, were a tremendous pain in the ass.

jQuery was great, but, you basically had to use it with something like PHP, because it had no back end. So when angular came out (and a few others that aren't around anymore and I've forgotten), it allowed you to replace both PHP and jQuery, and developers rejoiced.

Why did they rejoice? I'm not actually sure there was reason to, objectively speaking. As developers, we like new tech, especially if that new tech requires us to think about code differently, even if, in retrospect, it's a hard argument to make to say that, if we had just stuck with PHP and jQuery we would be somehow worse off than we are with React.

Of course, in tech, when a new system changes how we think, sometimes (not as often as we'd like) it helps us reconsider problems and find much more elegant solutions. So, would we have all the innovations we have today if all these js frameworks has never existed? Obviously we can't really answer that -- but it's a toke of copium for when we get nostalgic for the PHP/jQuery days.

(Also, for you newer people reading this, you should probably be aware that the PHP/jQuery mini-stack is still very quietly used. You'll definitely see it, especially in php-baaed COTS.)

The idea is sound but for most places I've heard of (ie in my city), condos just pay a management company to do all the landlord stuff, so even as an owner, I still have to call some crabby woman when the roofers drilled a hole in my A/C and fight with her -- and then also fight with the roofers -- to get it fixed

And I'm sure Microsoft would be happy to not have to do it anymore. And I personally would much prefer an actual typing system rather than a glorified linter.

Tho I wonder if it will end up being like jQuery, in the sense that, by the time core jQuery features got added to vanilla js, jQuery had developed new features that validated its continued existence. Maybe TS will go further than what gets absorbed into JS and keep it alive.