Official DiS Web Developer Thread

seems to go in peaks and troughs for me - sometimes I’m really interested, want to learn the latest stuff, do side projects (e.g. the Android apps I’ve made) and then others I cba whatsoever.

I’m currently well into a trough btw

Yeah, MVC isn’t out of date. It is very ‘current’ meaning nearly every job I see coming through needs it, but as breakfast says, a lot of stuff is moving to .Net Core and things like Web API and more service type stuff. I see a lot about Node.js as well, but I am not ready to give up on the MS stack and go down a completely different route. We are moving to Azure at work, so it’s all about functions etc.

I am not a geek outside of work. Interested enough to do it, but don’t know anything about hardware etc.

As for design patterns…well I have been a dev for 20 years, and try to write good, clean code and know the SOLID stuff pretty well. But patterns are a strange one. I can get the theory, and see how they are used in code we use (Factory Pattern for CC payment processors etc) but I’ve never started to work on something and thought that a pattern would help. It’s a high levelish thing I think. I design software, but never used one. Maybe I have used a ‘facade’ when just writing code that hides stuff behind an interface. Dunno.

Nope, and I won’t be made to feel like a lesser person because of it.

See also the classic interview question “what’s your most recent side project?” Fuck off, I’m not spending my evenings and weekends coding.

I find I tend to use them occasionally without realising it. It’s useful to know about them and I find they just sort of seep into your work naturally. I’ve rarely gone into a project and said “The Chain of Command* pattern fits perfectly here”, but when I look at the Gang of Four’s list of design patterns I’ve probably used about a third of them in the last year without deliberately choosing to do so at any point. That said, it’s as much about not using patterns when they’re not going to provide any value.

For my money, the most useful general purpose patterns are

  • Builder
  • Factory
  • Singleton
  • Composite
  • Facade
  • Observer

It’s no coincidence that most of those help make unit testing easier btw. A lot of the others are only useful when you’re writing specific types of code to my mind.

* I don’t actually know that one at all - I just had to go look an unusual one up.

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Yeah, I’ve learnt a lot from some amazing developers I have worked with. I got into the habit of very high levels of unit testing from seeing code others had written. Quite a simple class being put through it’s paces in tests with mocking etc. etc.

The good book I have is TDD in C# by Wrox. It’s quite thin, but covers off the SOLID concept quite well and makes the connection between these and Agile practises etc.

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Just imagined me doing lectures at universities and part of my presentation involves a hilarious bit called FrontEnders, in which I play a bit of the intro to Eastenders but I’ve changed the name to FrontEnders (first reasonably big laugh)

Two front-enders in an office and one of them turns to the other melodramatically “I FORGOT TO LAZY-LOAD THE IMAGES”

DUFF DUFF DUFF DUFF DUFF-DUFF-DUFF

audience in hysterics - I start crowd surfing

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any time I ever have to do a presentation I always toy with the idea of making it more fun, with attempts at jokes and stuff. then I don’t, and at best I put a few animations in my slides. and then the animations get removed from the final version by whoever puts it together. Oh well.

Couple of handy tips:

If you’ve got content in a modal hidden off the viewport until something is clicked, remember that your normal lazyloading won’t work as it will probably get triggered on page load. You need to initialize the load once the button to open the modal has been clicked.

If your mobile nav menu is absolutely positioned you need to put a max height on that with overflow: scroll, otherwise it’ll be impossible to scroll down it whenever it’s longer than the viewport as you’ll only be scrolling the page content behind it. Whack a max-height of 80vh on the nav.

Any front-end devs have days where you’ve spent hours on something then at the end of the day there’s hardly any change. You haven’t actually been stuck on a problem or anything… there’s just hardly any change. Like a few new elements for a website that youve had to design and build, just simple html and css, and they’ve taken you hours, for some reason. Gonna get fucking sacked.

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I used to have this all the time!
:+1:

Yeah, all the time. Getting pages to look the part is often a lot easier and quicker to get off the ground than stuff involving logic and functionality and fixing bugs and refactoring.

Anybody got any good resources for learning Redux with React? I’m in work and there’s a code freeze on until next year so I’m supposed to be spending my time on “personal skills development”.

Boss seems to think that all bits of text on a website should be defined by the class on their parent and thinks it has a big impact on SEO.

So if you’ve got a page with a large introductory bit of text and then a normal paragraph beneath it, instead of giving the large bit of text a class like ‘content__heading’ and then the following paragraph ‘content__subheading’, he thinks you should give its parent a class e.g. ‘content’ and then use inheritance to define the children, e.g. ‘content h2, content p’ or whatever.

That make sense if it’s for an article or something. But he thinks it should be for everything. Fuck off. Because he’s not heard of BEM.

Would it really affect SEO as much as he seems to think it does?

The way I write CSS is to keep html tags out of it wherever possible. Fucking fuck off.

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That won’t affect SEO one bit! Ask him why he thinks that? BEM :heart:

I did say I didn’t understand why it would make a difference.

“Google loves that”

Then he suggested that because there’s less characters in the markup it’ll make a page rank higher. The increase in site speed from removing some classes from the markup will be so negligible its not even worth mentioning. You have to weigh that up against the ease of use and maintainability of BEM. But he doesn’t know what BEM is, and obviously he knows best doesn’t he despite me having a degree in it and being a bit more up to date with these things. Why does he act like I’m thick.

HE MADE LOADS OF CHANGES TO THE WEBSITE WHY IS HE THINKING THIS IS THE REASON THE PAGE RANKED HIGHER. IT COULD HAVE BEEN ANYTHING YOU FUCKING TWAT.

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Just found out about ‘Web Components’. Literally only just heard of them. Didn’t realise how much I’ve destroyed my career by working where I work. Not sure I can even describe myself as a web developer anymore.

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I’ve been getting that feeling a lot. I work in a place where we primarily use a “low code” platform so everything is done in that. Been on an advanced React course lately and was alarmed to find out that I can’t really keep up because I’ve forgotten a lot of syntax and just navigating around VS Code is hard because I’ve forgot all the keyboard shortcuts and almost entirely forgotten Git :slightly_frowning_face:

I was gifted an extensive React course at Christmas. Really hard to muster the energy to get on with it though when you’ve been at work all day and it’s the last thing you want to be doing. There’s zero chance of me ever needing React at work but I suppose that’s the point, there’s a chance I’ll have completely missed the boat when it comes to applying elsewhere.

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Really pissed off about this again now. Even my fucking colleague mentioned it today as though it’s company policy or something fucking fndnfjfjfhfhdhrhfhdhjdjdjfncjfj4uffjfdncnccncncjcjffjfuxuxxhxjnxdber7r7rjjrrirudjdjccjxmxmdmdxdndjdjcjcucuc7dudidjj