Julia Evans
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, CSRF, various programming languages, etc), but also somehow it still feels extremely hard to me
Olivier Forget
@b0rk Back in 2006ish a friend sent me a book called "Building websites with PHP4 and MySQL" (or something along those lines). And I started building. I didn't have a job so I built something that a friend needed. I learned things along the way, like proper indexing of DB tables, etc... It's always felt hard, and it's still hard, but sticking to the most mainstream technologies and not getting lured by shiny objects is a sure way to make things easier.
Ben Ramsey
@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.
Jan Lehnardt :couchdb:
@b0rk from online tutorials and the php documentation in ~2000.
Ben Ramsey
@b0rk @janl I suspect there’s a large number of folks who accidentally became professional programmers in the 90s and early 00s, and I wonder if that’s something that could be replicated today, or was it unique to that time period?
Ben Ramsey
@b0rk @janl It might help to understand that I never saw myself as a programmer. It wasn’t a career I ever expected to pursue.
Ben Ramsey
@b0rk @janl All I had to do was focus on the code. I didn’t have to learn those other pieces at the same time, which, to me, would have been pretty big hurdles. There were very few moving parts, so to speak.
Julia Evans
@ramsey @janl absolutely not trying to criticize! just a bit surprised to hear it described as "easy" :)
Ben Ramsey
Julia Evans
@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?)
glamcode
@b0rk My first website that had some persistent state was done in Seaside in #Smalltalk. The framework was marketed as „heretic“, which immediately interested me. It had a very cool API to generate HTML, and my persistence was the Smalltalk image! It was truly amazing. It is still around: https://github.com/SeasideSt/Seaside
The hard part that frightened me most was not writing the software, but running a server.
Nick Sloan
@ramsey @wez @janl @b0rk It is impossible to overstate the extent to which today’s common web stacks are designed for solving Facebook and Google’s problems. Everything is so complex in part because the tools have been architected for a scale and context that is irrelevant to nearly every project that uses them.
We’re all subsidizing the biggest companies in the world.
Ben Ramsey
@wez @janl I'm in the same boat. Even as someone who's been doing this over 25 years, I'm intimidated by the level of complexity. I've adapted to it, of course, but I try to stay away from front-end as much as possible 😅, and I know some of it is for the better: things that @b0rk mentioned, like VCS, deployment practices, local dev, etc., I take these for granted now, but none of these were well-established when I was starting out.
Wez Furlong :terminal:
@b0rk (I also learned this around the same time as @ramsey and @janl) it was easy in the sense that you just edited a file and copied it up (or edited live on the box!). You didn't *have* to think about version control or push practices because the discipline was in its infancy and those things were not super common. It would have been more difficult to do those best practices because they were not common.
Wez Furlong :terminal:
@b0rk @ramsey @janl it was easier then also because it was essentially just simple HTML, maybe a dash of CSS and only if you were fancy, some JS. All those things were smaller in scope than today. On the server side it was just PHP and some kind of SQL database. All so much more grokkable than the fullest of the full stacks that folks deal with today. I think that modern webdev is dizzying in its complexity; it's very intimidating compared to what it once was. Much harder to get started today!
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