Hi all,
Glad to be in this community.
I’m a Web Developer, Technical Lead. Please feel free to ask me anything.
Cheers.
[AMA] I’m a Web Developer, ask me anything.
Lreactvue on 22/07/2018 - 11:36
closed Comments
I wouldn’t say it is a true “programming” language, it is more of a markup language as there are no constructs, no control statements and no logical flow. It’s like a lower level word document, but for the web.
What do think about the advancement of artificial intelligence, do you think, one day humans will take over the world?
Humans have already taken over the world but technically not yet, until we are a type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale.
But if you meant AI taking over the world, that can be likely if not already if we really all belong to a simulated reality.
It's not a programming language in the slightest. It is, and only is, a markup language. Even the "ML" in HTML stands for "markup language."
I'm pretty sure it's Modern Language.
Cause all the cool kids speak HTML5 nowadays.
Huh?
This is wrong.
How are you a technical lead?
It's in the name. It's a markup language by it's very definition and it's in the name so people don't forget that. There is no "maybe" or "kind ofs".
You don't program in XML, HTML, CSS any more than you do in JPEG and TIFF.
I never said it was a programming language.. what’s your problem?
I wouldn’t say it is a true “programming” language
and he asked this question (why? then)
Why do you think HTML is a programming language?
So when someone says you said the sky was blue, you say… it's not truly blue, it's more like red.
Or do you actually just say "No, it's red."
I've just come to realise that none of your answers are actually definitive or give any real information from your background.
@StoneSin: I see where you’re coming from.. this is just my way of being nice and not completely put down the idea, giving a soft alternative so less likely to destroy their confidence. Words can be powerful, I would suggest you re-evaluate yours.
@shirotech: ???
That's not being nice, you're just answering a question wrong. No one's world is going to be destroyed if you tell them what HTML is. The one thing you put yourself here to do is to answer questions ….
"You know, I might be a homosexual, but truly I'm more of a heterosexual."
none of your answers are actually definitive or give any real information from your background.
He must be from It support.
@Scab: It's okay Scab, he's being nice, so he's doing a good job, much like tech support.
No one cares that the answers are on politician level of rebound.
Never was a programming language.
Would you rather use React or Angular?
I would use React, but both are bloated with features you may or may not use. I have been investing some time in developing with HyperApp, it can do almost everything React can do but just with 1kB.
Tried react loadable?
Looks interesting, how's the performance since the components are loaded dynamically? Would that mean the user will see the component slower?
@shirotech: There are other ways to achieve this, but the goal is a very small bundle for the initial load. Server side rendering gives you the static page, split bundles makes that page interactive, then the rest of the app can be loaded.
Notepad not good enough for you?
Any thoughts on Vue? Thanks
Vue.js is pretty awesome actually, rising in popularity in recent years.
how much would it cost me to build a web page? lets say something like a forum page
It can cost anywhere between “free” and hundreds depending on how customise and private/secure you want it. Generally if you google “host free forums” will give lots of results. For more professional ones you will need to hire one or host it yourself.
Approximately zero dollars assuming you can configure it yourself, and are able to pay for hosting / domain.
Find a good solution here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_s…
How's your relationship with web designers?
I sometimes work closely with them depending on the project. My current company they would design in Sketch, consult me for anything that may be technically challenged and I offer advise and alternatives if it seems undesirable. The next process is they will upload it to Zeplin which developers can inspect individual elements such as exact widths and heights in pixels, color, border etc. This then gets translated html, css and Javascript. When page is built it will then be uploaded to a staging server for QA to test and the original designer to review and comment.
Are you from Sydney by any chance? That flow sounds remarkably similar to where I work and I'm now gonna go and ask all the tech leads if they have secret OzB identities.
Location in profile is Melbourne's
Nope, Melbourne bred. Been Sydney couple of times, nicer weather there :)
My office in Sydney works identical to this as well. I think its just the modern practice.
- Do you have any recommendations on how to learn web development?
- With services such as Wordpress, Squarespace etc. how relevant is web programming since people can do things easily on their own? Is it correct to say that web development would be more tailored for a client who doesn't want to use those services?
- What languages do you know?
- If you had to recommend a language what would you recommend?
- If you had to choose between front end and back end, which one would you choose? Full stack would be best thought right?
- Can you apply web development paradigms to general programming or vice versa?
Thanks in advance.
- There are many great tutorial sites out there that you can learn for free such as w3schools, references from mozilla. But those will only scratch the surface and won’t get you in the door. Unless you have talent or have built websites before to show your potential employer, if that is your end goal to land a job. There are really good paid coarses out there that are very relevant to the current market as I have been interviewing some pretty good candidates that came from General Assembly.
- Those services that helps you generate websites with drag and drop are good only for general purpose where it is mainly looking good with content and basic editing capabilities. If you want a fully customised features for a web applications, think mypost from auspost.com.au website. Custom registrations, accounts, inventory and personalisations. You will always need a professional (for the time being).
- I would say I know a vast majority of programming languages such as php, perl, python, java, c, c#, c++, objective-c, javascript, sql etc. and many more obsecure languages.
- To be a true Web Developer you cannot limit yourself to a specific stack, you need to know your way through both front end and back end, also the database and devops layer will come in handy. Making yourself a full-stack which will be very sought after in the current market.
- Yes you can use mvc and other architure patterns for web development, it is still software and requires coding and managing, helps to make it reusuable also.
Thanks a lot for answering all my questions. That's interesting about the General Assembly thing, I was wondering what quality their courses were like.
I can’t be certain of the quality myself as I never took those coarses, but from interviewing people who opted in GA rather than uni it seems GA is more relevant. Where as a fresher from uni will need to learn or relearn 95% of what uni didn’t teach them to do the job. And someone from GA would be ready for work with minimal or less training required. The GA graduate will be easier to work with and hence will be more preferred to hire. Having said that I work for a startup, in large corps will probably have a different view as they may value a paper degree over actual skills.
@shirotech: Yeah that's understandable. At uni they teach you a load of theory but from experience not much practical work is done (although I'm not studying Comp Sci or Software Development). There are assignments etc. but the theory really outweighs the practice. I'm guessing at GA it's mainly focused on actual "doing" whereas theory takes a back seat so it may not teach you how to "think" as such.
@Ghost47: You would think that, having mentored developers from all backgrounds. They all have a common trait or limitation. Juniors or freshers normally can “think” but not on their own as they generally don’t have the experience or empowered to make decisions. There are exceptions, and also with proper guidance most can learn to think on the job. If anything it just requires passion and the thirst for knowledge.
Forgot to answer about recommending a language. It would be Javascript, because it works both in front end and backend (Node.js) making it the ideal language for Web Developers. With ES6 and latest ES8 making it even more powerful and easy to work with.
Does JS Animation play a major role in slowing down website performance?
It does somewhat, most animations can be achieved with CSS with some pretty good browser support. It is best to opt for CSS animations as it will be in most cases hardware accelerated, you would want that if your website is responsive and viewable for mobile users since the processors won’t be as powerful. Also CSS will generally use less code and doesn’t require 3rd party libraries which can bloat the website which can be a bottleneck and tech debt to optimise or remove later on.
What is JS Animation?
Do you mean screen rendering changes?
JS is actually pretty fast, it's the DOM that is slow. i.e. if you wrote some code to perform something, as long as it's not changing the render process significantly, i.e. adding thousands of boxes, divs, texts, then it will be fine. Of course there's more to animations than just "remove and add this thing".
I'm not sure if this is the right word but what stack do you mostly use or is most popular?
When a client is talking to you about requirements what do they normally miss out on, or forget to include?
A specific stack is too testrictive, mainly it is a marketing gimmick to promote LAMP or MEAN or whatever 4 letter acronym they came up with. Having said that I prefer the vanilla JavaScript frontend and JavaScript backend (Node.js) it makes sense to me and allows much more ways for reusuable modules.
Clients normally will give a high level goal of what they want as a result of the build. This is the best case so you can come up with your own requirements and solution. When a client doesn’t know what they want, they will just say use xyz and do abc, and hope for the best. You will need to do more discovery with the client because it will miss out important details like what is it they want to achieve and connecting backends and integration points.
What is your favorite web browser & why?
inb4 firefox
It would have to be Chrome mainly for the impeccable tools for devs. Also it is a good platform to test because of the v8 engine that most javascript interpreters will use such as backend Node.js
I thought most programmers use firefox
Maybe 6 years ago, but all the developers I’ve worked with also prefer Chrome nowadays.
Yeah, these days it's a chrome monoculture much like what happened with IE6 15 years ago.
Nah real devs use Chrome!
@shirotech: Actually, Firefox made a comeback with Quantum in late 2017 and is now faster than chrome, and the dev tools are just as good IMO (though I'm more backend web app dev).
@ItsMeAgro: Heard great things about it actually, but kinda used to Chrome now. Will check it out for sure!
nodejs or php
I stopped programming in PHP 8 years ago, and can’t say much for it now. php was my first programming language, but it doesn’t handle CLI apps very well. Node.js takes the cake here.
Thanks for your sharing Shirotech.
I Googled CLI, is this more of a benefit for the programmers, or for an end user?
Are there any scenarios where we see the CLI as the end user?
Most CLI applications are for power users, whatever makes their life easier will make the life of the end users they develop those apps for. Hope that makes sense!
Do u think Dev roles will eventually all get outsourced to lower cost countries? What sort of Dev roles are safer and why?
Having delt with “lower cost” countries, we have a branch in India. Generally if you know what you want and have the patience to brief them every single detail, they will only do what is asked and the common sense as we know it might be a little different over there. Given that kind of restriction, innovation and apps that is performance critical you will still have to pay the big bucks to attract the best in the industry. To answer your question, if you are highly skilled at the top level, no one can really replace you (for now, or atleast 5-10 years down the line).
Haaha, I know what you meant. I have worked with Application developers from India, both onsite and offshore. What have I observed that the offshore team is mostly consists of very junior developers, and 1-2 senior developers. Senior developers actually work on more than one clients (this is not reveled to the clients themselves) and hence can't concentrate on the jobs from one specific client. Furthermore, the developers are instructed to just do the things asked, instead of using their brains for features/ enhancements so that the client can be billed more. So this is more of dodgy practice of the companies rather than the people themselves.
I came to know about these practices when I visited and worked for 6 months in one such companies.
Actually that is the mentality over there, for our case it is our actual branch, so they have no reason to hold back. For them it is the same pay whether they do bare minimum or above and beyond. I think this also applies for offshore agencies also. There is just no incentives, everyone gets paid the same rate by seniority also.
outsourcing is so 2010
As a web developer do you appreciate the work of the original web developers, spiders?
They helped shaped the web, the founding fathers, but still freaks me out!
Personally I take a flamethrower at them and don't let go.
- Have you heard anything about Coder Academy?
- Would you recommend web development as an industry to aspire towards?
I havent’t heard of Coder Academy, sounds like they do similar things to General Assembly.
I would strongly recommend Web Development as a career path. The pay is good, and you get lots of respect if you are deemed as an expert. It does however requires dedication and discipline, technology is growing at an ever changing pace and you need to keep up or will lag behind. For me it is worth all the effort, and absolutely love doing what I do, I don’t see it as a job but more like gamers are paid to play games. For me I find enjoyment in software development, and getting paid for it is awesome.
Stay very far away from Coder Academy. You're MUCH better off with Udemy.
Thanks for the comment, is this from personal experience?
What kind of “generic/typical” skill do you need to consider become a web developer? E.g. physicists - logical, good at maths?
You don’t need to be brilliant in Mathematics or scientific excellence. Just need to be a good problem solver and a curious mind. Problem solving comes in many forms and programming is one of them. Writing elegant code can be artistic, depends how much pride you put into it.
What was your education course that got you here now? I'm considering almost all of the free resources alongside reading eloquent
I did bachelors of IT, but to be honest it was a very competitive market to break into. You can read all the best resources available but it won’t be worth anything until you can put it to use. I would recommend to start a project about something you’re interested in or technologies you want to learn more about. Actually doing the practical work will give you more credits than theory. After all it is a hands on kinda job, thinking is just part of it. Once you get to a Senior level, than you can do the real thinking.
Actually you need to do real thinking to get to Senior level…
Oops probably didn't worded that right, what I meant was you won't be empowered to make decisions even if you think you are right. When you reach Senior, you can put that "real" thinking to use and can actually make decisions and make an impact.
Do you work with testers? Do they annoy you?
I lead the whole development team and that also include testers or more preferably QA. They are one of the important gate keepers that ensures there are no bugs before anything goes into production. They do not annoy me, as they are merely doing their job, and their job is to find bugs. Whether we like it or not, there are always going to be bugs and it is the team’s responsibility to find and fix the bugs before the client sees it.
That's good! Now as a tester, how can I make your job better :) Also have you seen a lot of automation replace manual testers successfully?
Because of QA/Testers, really helps makes life easier already :) The one thing however I would like to see the most is for the QA to be more proactive and take the initiative. I know this is easier said than done, but work with the Lead more when there is a new project coming. Get involved at the start and write the test cases together, making it more TDD/BDD. This set of structure allows more transparency, will know exactly what the testers will look out for, and when we code will take those points in consideration.
My honest opinion is automations are not meant to replace manual testing (not yet until you really use AI/ML), currently it complements each other. Automations will test the flows and edge cases, manual testing is to get that pixel perfect cross browser where automations currently cannot pick up.
That QA VS. Dev mentality is so old school, we're all responsible for quality.
I once had a geocities site.. am i a web developer?
:) ??
Sir, you were a webmaster.
I believe God is appropriate in these circumstances
is it Y2K bug ready? :D
What things do I need to consider if wanted to post a live web cam 24/7
privacy
Not an expert in this field, but as mentioned privacy and security would be highest concern. Then storage and data retention if you are recording and keeping archives.
Has nothing to do with web development.
The web side would just read an image file put in a certain place every ### minutes.
The rest is not hard, but it's usually some magic done by the camera itself.
What is your opinion on Ruby on rails? Would you use it or is there an alternative you prefer?
I haven't developed using Ruby yet, can't say much of it. I would prefer Node.js because it is the language I am familiar with because of the vast community out there and also the large number of packages in the npm repositories.
What's your opinion on server side rendering for React. Do you do it yourself, use Nextjs, or don't even both and keep it as an SPA?
I can understand keeping application work as an SPA, since it is probably behind a paywall anyway. However homepage stuff would still have to just be plain HTML and javascript for interactions only for SEO (since you need to attract people to sign up in the first place).
Do you use a multi page approach for homepage, and then a SPA approach for the app?
Ideally every page is server rendered on the first request, then the SPA bits including react/redux are loaded asynchronously after that page is served.
JSX is also a good to use as a server side template engine, even if you don't have an SPA on that page. In my opinion it is cleaner than writing raw HTML as you can't make a mistake or it won't render. I use my own server rendering using a little library I wrote that works just as well. Having said that it is "server" rendered, you don't actually need a backend server, can just pre-render and use nginx rewrite to make it always land on the index.html matching a routing pattern.
Do you even cloud?
I know of Cloud from FF7
Why do you think HTML is a programming language?