Unfrozen Caveman Web Developer
Jan 14
Back in my day, we had to make clear single-pixel GIFs out of mud. Our mothers would beat us with <BR> tags. We would cry ourselves to sleep on a bed of pointy, itchy COLSPANs.
I'm in a weird spot right now, because I feel like the proverbial caveman frozen in ice. I started doing web development in 1995, back when sites were simple and ugly. I was busiest around 2000, when pages were prettier but were a pile of turd under the hood, with unbelievably complex table-based layout that wasn't human-readable. Web standards like CSS existed but weren't supported well by the installed base of browsers, so you had to target the lowest common denominator.
Consequently, I got lazy and didn't ever bother with CSS or semantic HTML — the old crappy methods worked, and for me they were pretty fast and reliable, so I stuck with them for a few years. Then I became a manager and didn't have any time to write code on a daily basis, so there I was, fixed in time.
I had the good fortune to hire a really smart developer, though, who was younger and not so tied to the old stupid way of doing things, and he convinced me that the old way was dumb, and that semantic HTML was actually a really good idea again. My team started doing everything the right way, and the benefit was obvious.
This is where it got to be a really weird spot, though, because I was quite familiar with how everything worked conceptually, but I hadn't done a lick of work with the "new" technology. It's an uncomfortable feeling to be supervising people and realize that for a major swath of what they're doing, they are significantly more knowledgeable than you are.
Anyway, long story short, in buildling the new Monkeytreats, I'm finally getting to build things the Right Way, the way my developers have been for the last two years. I'm getting to test out some of my own ideas about usability and design that I haven't been able to push at work. There are certainly some pains in the ass, but in general everything is just so wonderfully clean and simple. I'm really excited about development again, as opposed to 2005, when I was so sick of writing crappy code for stupid projects that I was ready to give it all up and leave it to some other sucker.
Now, though, you can look at HTML and it actually makes sense, it actually is descriptive. You can tweak a CSS declaration and fix problems all over your site, without having to do endless levels of nested, incomprehensible includes. Hell, you can even just grab some free pre-built blogging software, instead of having to painstakingly hand-roll your own CMS.
Long story even shorter: Caveman developer like future. Jetpack is fun!