The Web Design & Development Megathread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > The Web Design & Development Megathread

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

Newbie to web development here (student):
I understand that, in the professional world, websites are made by a team that has people specialized for certain parts of the website, which require different skillsets I.e. a front-end using templates and coding in html5/javascript/jQuery, a back-end using maybe mySQL and Oracle, a person handing data between the two with php or Ruby, and a UX person to streamline the whole process for users of the website. Different websites doing different things would ask for different mixes of those aforementioned four.
But who coordinates everything together so that, despite the different skillsets everyone has, they can still have a main idea of what the website should be like, and who ensures that you have just the right people with just the right skillsets for each project? I imagine a project manager, right? How do professional web developers coordinate projects?
Does nobody do full-stack? Do some people switch off between dofferent skillsets depending on the needs of the project? Could a front-end guy do, say, some back-end work if it was rudimentary, or be trained for both?
VVV Thanks.

America Inc. fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Mar 17, 2015

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 06:45

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 14:50

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

Is the job market for web developers reaching overcapacity?
If not, considering that templates are very popular in the industry, is it difficult to command good pay on the front-end?

America Inc. fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Mar 26, 2015

# ¿ Mar 26, 2015 21:18

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

gmq posted:

the new shiny thing

What do you think that might be?

# ¿ Mar 26, 2015 23:34

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

Why does there seem to be a trend to move away from client-based single page apps towards server-side rendering that returns static html to the client, for example with Next.js?

# ¿ Oct 25, 2022 22:10

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

kedo posted:

Apropos of nothing let me just say I really, truly loath GoDaddy.

Why don't you use Netlify you boomer
https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/netlify-dns/

E: actually it looks like anyone using GoDaddy should drop it like it's hot and run: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/godaddy-says-a-multi-year-breach-hijacked-customer-websites-and-accounts/

America Inc. fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Feb 18, 2023

# ¿ Feb 17, 2023 07:08

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

FISHMANPET posted:

I think Bootstrap does that, there's probably others that do similar things.

There's also Tailwind, if I'm correctly understanding your concern as being that you want to make your existing HTML look better and not just add premade components.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2023 06:25

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

prom candy posted:

Tailwind doesn't come with any real styles. There's also shoelace https://shoelace.style

TIL you can define your own custom HTML elements (aka Web Components). React and Vue are the kiddy pool - and yet so much of the ecosystem and job requirements are built around it.

Well now I know some skills I can learn to get away from the herd.

America Inc. fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Feb 23, 2023

# ¿ Feb 23, 2023 08:33

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

prom candy posted:

Also "the herd" is where the jobs are.

True. But if you want the carrot you either have to be leading the flock, hope that you can run the fastest and get lucky, find the one they're not telling you about, or learn how to grow carrots yourself.

I also understand there's very little utility gained by the sound of my whining

America Inc. fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Feb 28, 2023

# ¿ Feb 28, 2023 05:54

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

prom candy posted:

but if/when that changes it'll be the Wild West again for a while as people build web frameworks in all kinds of different languages (like Leptos in Rust)

I was gonna ask, has anyone here tried functional programming with Clojure or Elm, or even Ramda? It's my understanding that functional programming used to be more popular in Web circles.

In regards to wasm, the company I used to be at has been trying to compile their C++ backend into wasm for ages for the web app. It hasn't worked out so far.

E: I actually see a parallel between modern C++ (and Rust) and the emergence of frameworks like Svelte and Next. With both there is a focus on moving the responsibility for performance off the developer onto the language or framework itself, and a focus on doing more stuff at compile time and not run time.

America Inc. fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Mar 2, 2023

# ¿ Mar 2, 2023 07:35

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

teen phone cutie posted:

i wish i was able to get off linkedin, but honestly nothing beats in right now in terms of searching for jobs. i think indeed is basically useless at this point

When I quit my job in September I was cold applying on Indeed and ZipRecruiter, but now I'm spending more time daily on LinkedIn than I've ever spent in my life. It's got most everything you need in one place, and the people that reach out thankfully aren't ghosting me. A good LinkedIn profile is just as valuable as a good resumé.

I did get one guy from Colombia message me and offer to apply to jobs for me and then do my job when I got hired for a cut of the paycheck. I'm not into fraud so I said no.

If you are looking for a job board that doesn't suck, I recommend Otta.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2023 04:41

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

My least favorite kind of frontend interview is when they test you on your knowledge of a framework. I'm not the kind of person who reads the docs for fun. You can ask me "when do we need to use refs in React?" and my answer is "why do I need to know?" Is it really an interview if I can cram it?

I prefer something more collaborative like doing a design or building out UI. Perhaps because I was interviewing for a senior position, they wanted to see that I had that deep experience where I just know the framework like the back of my hand.

Also, I can understand why you wouldn't want to do it but it would cool if they said at the end of the interview "nah, you didn't get it" instead of waiting for HR to say it.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2023 04:38

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

E: Moved this question to Working in Dev thread, sorry for double post.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2023 08:29

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

I'm pushing to add Storybook to an open source project I work on, but I'm getting some pushback because the lead maintainer says they "tried to use it before and decided not to". I interviewed with a startup the other week and they said something similar.

From my perspective, Storybook is nothing but gain because you can develop UI components by themselves. You don't have to load up the whole app to develop, and it encourages developers to make reusable components. You can make prototypes and have UX review them before they go into the app. Right now people are spinning up the whole app for development and hot reloading takes a non-trivial amount of time.

What are the pain points or things that really suck about Storybook?

America Inc. fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Apr 8, 2023

# ¿ Apr 8, 2023 01:19

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

As a frontend developer, would it be useful for my career to learn how to make websites in Wordpress and other CMSes? I've been talking with a few people about improving their websites and it's always a wordpress or WIX site.

In my main job I do React and Django stuff but for freelancing those skills ironically seem to be irrelevant. I did make a proposal for a job on Upwork that would actually involve frontend work.

# ¿ May 30, 2023 07:04

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

White Light posted:

It's honestly been getting to me a lot lately but I feel like I'm job-locked with no real path of escaping to greener pastures. Does anyone have some good advice or leads on where I might like to start looking first? It'd be real swell to live in an area not forever destined to drown in an autocratic chamber area.

1. Try to attend design or tech meetups in your area and get to know people. Even if you're a goon, you must have some people skills to have got this far.
2. Do you have LinkedIn? Reach out to people at places you want to work and ask for informational interviews. Not referrals, which are usually worthless if the person hasn't worked with you before, but interviews where you ask what they do and what the company is like and get their opinion. Ask what skills you need to get hired.
3. Spend some time everyday sending out job applications. It's a numbers game where you apply to a lot of companies and you learn. If people aren't getting back to you, that means you've got to change something up. Get to interviews, gently caress up and learn some more.

Everybody's heard of that story of that guy who had a magic hookup through their friend to a cool company but don't hinge your job search on it. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

I'm a web developer so I'm not sure of good design job boards or learning resources.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2023 05:43

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

I ran into a surprising issue with a React app I'm making, that breaks my expectations about how the framework should work. In my mind, React works like this: you've got a hierarchy of components, each with their own state. When the state of the parent updates, the children are re-mounted, and the state is reset to initial values.

But with this app, that's clearly not what's happening. Imagine you have where you can search for a set of listings, and the listings update whenever you input text into the search field (live search). The components are laid out like this:

code:

const [query, setQuery] = useState("");
<>
	<Search onUpdateText /> // onUpdateText is a listener that updates query
	<ListingsPage query={query} />
</>

The ListingsPage has a useEffect hook that will run a paginated API call on the query along with a pageNo state variable (initially set to 1).

Now my expectation is that when I, as a user, input new text into the search field, that will update the query state variable, which triggers a re-render of the app, which will re-mount ListingsPage and reset pageNo to 1. That's not what happens though: if I'm on the 2nd page of results (pageNo is 2), and I update the query, pageNo stays at the value of 2. WTF?

I can think of some ways to change the data flow to avoid this problem, but that's really not what I thought React did. I added this line to check when mounting happens:

code:

useEffect(() => { console.log("Did mount?"); }, [])

and I can see that the ListingsPage component is not being re-mounted when query changes.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 19:19

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

Ima Computer posted:

There's a decent article in the new react docs that goes into this in more detail as well.

prom candy posted:

Also not sure exactly what you're doing but this is essential reading for newer React devs: https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect

Thanks for these links! I've been taking some things for granted with React, so I should refresh on the basics.

For this particular case, I found that I could add a useEffect to reset the page number on query change. It's not elegant, but it works.

code:

useEffect( () => { setPageNo(1); }, [query] )

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 23:25

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

I've got another question that's not really a webdev question, but it has to do with websites. My mom uses this really, really ugly website for her job to log hours, and to get her hours for sick leave she has to fix some errors with her attendance. The interface they provide to fix those errors is of course really dumb, and she has to click "Disagree" on 100 items, fill out a form with a dropdown and text input, and click a submit button. Because there are 100 items, she has to do this 100 times. There is no "Disagree all" button.

Does anyone know of a tool she can use that will just automatically select all the "Disagree" buttons, and fill out the form for her? Sounds like a good browser extension. Maybe this will work? https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/axiom-browser-automation/cpgamigjcbffkaiciiepndmonbfdimbb?hl=en-GB

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:36

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 14:50

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

Now I'm trying to help an org with translating their website to multiple languages. I'm still debating whether it's really necessary to translate content when Google will already do that for you, but I'm pretty certain that we at least want to translate the SRP into different languages. If you're searching for our website in Spanish, and specify "only show results in Spanish", we're not gonna show up b/c the website isn't in Spanish. duh.

So usually a website will store their search result description in

pre:

<meta name="description" />

in the index.html. I see that one possible approach is to have different index.html files, each with their own language specified in the html eg.

pre:

<html lang="en">

, but the problem with this approach is that when you're building with react-scripts, you have to gently caress around with the PUBLIC_URL env variable to get it to build properly - the tool is only expecting one index.html in the same place under public/.

Another approach I found is to use react-helmet, and just set the meta tag dynamically depending on browser language. Will Google's crawler actually be able to pull the correct SRP description from this though?

Also, is it necessary to add keywords to the meta tags as well for different languages to get good SEO?

# ¿ May 6, 2024 05:55

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > The Web Design & Development Megathread