Getting back into “software engineer” / “full-stack web dev” game when you’re pushing 40 is quite a chore when it was something you just fell back on because you were good doing it growing up 15+ years ago.
After year of jacking off, the sum of all my compounded bad habits, poor lifestyle choices and several relapses beyond the base of maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I know I need to do something to make money again.
My story into web dev/design was a lot different 15 years ago than it is now. Growing up in the age of static html, Macromedia Flash, iframes, and everything/nothing web-sites, web-rings, and the invigorating power of youth I was able to get an edge on everyone else.
I could endlessly geek out in Flash and ActionScript, Photoshop, and Notepad. Web-design was very raw and experimental and it wasn’t programmers or engineers calling the shots or paving the way, it was artists and people fucking with Flash, tapping into the power of assimilating multiple mediums on one canvas. Yeah, many people groin whenever they think about “the age of the flash intro” except the ones highly involved and active creating them.
Shit like ultrashock forums, newgrounds, phong, and everyone else in-between trying to crack the code of a decent 2advanced rip-off. Eric Jordan was king and really paved the way for web-design across the board, whether it was UI/UX or just sick ass animations/motion-graphics.
I still remember bringing my copy of The New Masters of Flash down to spring break with me during High School and combing through all sorts of approaches.
Ultrashock used to do this weekly “tip of the hat” to some community contribution called the bombshock or something and man it was fun making stuff for the web.
Fast-forward to the present….
Today the age of the web-designer/developer is long gone; don’t get me wrong, the web was always fertile grounds for software engineers and programmers to thrive, it just took them a minute to build out the abstractions, languages, tooling, and an entire industry that we take for granted these days.
The Pirates of Silicon Valley’s ship has sailed and we are left an assortment of job titles, roles, abstractions, approaches, and practices to building stuff the “right” way. You will rarely see that guy who can own the vision AND build his creation. After so many years, developers stopped doing so much design work in order to make space for alternative disciplines and approaches to doing work they didn’t receive any higher education on or care to invest time into.
Don’t get me wrong, that design/developer hybrid is still out there and getting stuff done, he’s just sort of eclipsed by all the noise that is the internet these days competing for you attention.
Right off the bat, mrdoob comes to mind, and I feel like the designers who can put their money (their mocks or wireframes) where their mouth is (as code in an editor) are the ones doing the most interesting work. You will rarely get the developer working in the opposite direction into the nomenclature of design.
I dunno, I’m just trying to come to terms for answering the question “why is it so hard for me to start something from scratch,” and I think it’s that loss of (design) ownership I once felt when building out stuff back in the day.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3y0XHl4
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