Confessions of a Web Developer XVIII

By  on  

It's been quite a while since I've gotten a few things off of my chest and since I'm always full of peeves and annoyances I thought it was time to unleash:

  • Sometimes you need to get out of the cult and stop drinking the Kool-Aid to see an organization for what it is. My childhood dream was working for Mozilla, and I made the best of it, but now from the outside, I see an organization devoid of ideas when it desperately needs them. Amazing engineers being led by failing leadership...
  • ...and what's even more amazing is that getting laid off was the best thing that could've happened to me. I put my entire severance into various cryptocurrencies and got a crypto dream job. Sometimes you need to get pushed off the diving board to truly learn to swim.
  • Robinhood illustrated why cryptocurrency is so important -- global, 24/7, permissionless. When the little guy loses, it's "just how it works" -- when the big guy loses, they turn off the game. Cryptocurrency is money made for the internet age, where the billionaires don't start off ahead -- it's the great monetary reset. Get in now before they do.
  • I recently upgraded from iPhone 7 to iPhone 12 and holy hell, what an amazing upgrade of battery and speed. The weird thing -- it was only 4 years between them. The speed and quality upgrade in such a small time is a peek into future expectations.
  • My 7 year old son's school has started an eSports team. I was surprised but I shouldn't be -- eSports will rival NFL revenues and viewership by the time I die.
  • The next time you think about a new project or industry, zoom out and think big, broader. Think about how you can make your millions.
  • I'm really impressed by the Valve Index -- fast, comfortable, and a worthy upgrade over the HTC Vive. I'm completely unimpressed by the lack of VR experiences released over the past five years, however. The VR industry is completely lacking of headline titles.
  • Apple TV's gaming was a disappointment. Their streaming content was a disappointment. When will Apple stop half-assing everything?!
  • Madison, Wisconsin is full of lovely people, a great atmosphere, and a growing tech culture, but I can't believe I put up with living in an igloo all winter. Being shut in is even more depressing during the time of COVID.
  • My next business enterprise will be creating NFTs. There's so much money to be made in NFTs, and the industry is only beginning.
  • I used to think all browser usage was going to go down. Seeing Brendan Eich's Brave growth has been impressive...while making me realize Firefox's demise is due to a complete lack of imagination. Brave introduced better privacy, a new cryptocurrency, and other integrations -- Firefox has committed to nothing.
  • Replay is going to change the landscape of not just debugging but bug reporting. Screenshots and text descriptions are cute but imagine being able to share debuggable experiences!
  • I'm going to write a blog post about anxiety soon. It will be the most painful, honest post you'll ever read. I'm afraid to write it....

Any strong feelings about my comments? Have anything you'd like to confess? Please share!

Recent Features

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Your Own Dijit CSS Theme with LESS CSS

    The Dojo Toolkit seems to just get better and better.  One of the new additions in Dojo 1.6 was the use of LESS CSS to create Dijit themes.  The move to using LESS is a brilliant one because it makes creating your own Dijit theme...

  • By
    :valid, :invalid, and :required CSS Pseudo Classes

    Let's be honest, form validation with JavaScript can be a real bitch.  On a real basic level, however, it's not that bad.  HTML5 has jumped in to some extent, providing a few attributes to allow us to mark fields as required or only valid if matching...

Discussion

  1. I’m not all that down on the Apple TV+ content. My wife and I enjoyed Ted Lasso and are currently enjoying The Servant.

  2. Emre

    Thank you for sharing these series, I love’em. Please do so, more often. I’m looking forward to your new post about anxiety and how you got over it.

  3. Wiktor Water

    “eSports will rival NFL revenues and viewership by the time I die.”
    My man, as i know, eSports already outpaced NFL in those numbers, and we are ‘only’ in 2021. Don’t die early! This train might already passed ;)

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!