Learning everything again sucks
Tags: webdev, beginners, programming
Published: 2024-04-25 10:57:39

So I've been a developer since I was a child I didn't know what else to do with my time and I don't like being lonely so I got into computers so I could always have someone to talk to.

Went to university a bunch of times learnt about physics with computing not enough computing for me so I left. Then went to study computer systems engineering. Made too many friends had too much fun needed to have some time to recover. Started a family everything went wrong. Started another family again everything went wrong my fault obviously. Back to computers they do what they are told (mostly). 

So I went back to University to study software development because I never wanted to be a manager I'm too much of an anarchist for that. Qualified got a certificate and my first job in cryptography as a tester. Not development like I wanted but a start is a start then got a new job finally development. Working with some advanced mathematics to track the risks for customers from a certain gambling exchange site. Made some really cool test frame work that was multi threaded and had a fun interface in c# also got into programming games for the xbox given that indie game dev was cool(ish) I know it's kind of niche. 

Lost that job because you cannot have a criminal record when working in fraud detection and because I am an enemy of the state for crimes the government made up I had to work somewhere else. Luckily for me the University of Cambridge also dislikes the government (personal opinion) so they gave me a contract to work of possibly one of the worlds largest websites to spread the words of mathematics to the masses. Here I had a great mentor who taught me that it's not building to the method of the doctrine of academia it's building something that works then improving. Learned how to make mysql work and understand the lamp stack in great depth. 

PHP is now my master and I have started making simple websites for anyone who wants them to practice and rehearse my craft. Also starteed to learn about the witchcraft that is git so I can start setting up templates for the standard services I like to use and the patterns that I use grow and grow. Now I'm starting to learn that PHP might not be the way so then switch over to a different part of the University town and learn Plone working to pixel perfect specifications for a designer who always knew when I hadn't quite tamed internet explorer. It seemed to be a great new pattern that I could edit the thing that was the code and the content management system from within the content management system so I decided to see if I could make my own CMS. It turned out to be really easy so I ended up serving javascript files from a database which meant I didn't need to use the operating system the way it was intended anymore and had my first example of my own little cloud. Now I really got into peer to peer technologies to avoid chaos in the when/ if my little database goes down. Now I've got my poor little brain into a right muddle because it seems like you can get code to self host and just weirdly exist as long as enough connections are sustained. So the browsers connect with each other and you can share state down a stream. Ok great so this is probably when I thought about having an always streaming service that so long as it had connections would just get bigger and bigger. This turned out to be a really bad idea and the streams reach aobut 96GB before crashing any machine that was connected. Who knew JS was such a monster? 

So what had I learned. Well nothing because once I had reached the state of recovering the mess I had made I realised that all this stuff was equivalent to what I have learned when I was encouraged to learn lisp. Everything is an object and a function. So what does this mean? It means you will have certain problems to solve and there are multiple solutions. I have also learnt that commercialism will ruin a good thing and if I had done the same experiment with todays technology I would probably owe amazon six trillion dollars. Compute time used to be something you would worry about and try to make whatever thing you were building work on your local machine with a maddening amount of configuration but now you can get a container for this and a container for that then you just have to work out how all the connections work you can handle amounts of content far beyond my poor human minds capacity. So you make a nice webscraper because python does this too well. Get all the credit card numbers of every customer in the world and then on the sixteenth of november crash the entire credit card network because you flood it with too many transactions to handle but not as a DDOS attack nope because you've got this code all over the world on so many machines because you wrote a nice little npm library that does something helpful and as it's been doing well for over a decade people trust it. 

So it's now on a whole bunch of large and mid sized sites which means it's been spread to anyones machine who is actively using that site because js streaming things are fun. Now we just wait and see what will happen when suddenly all of the "money" that existed on these cards gets used to buy v-bucks or some other kind of digital currency and then sends it around all over the place from node to node then who is to blame? Me for experimenting with computers the credit card companies for making use of open source technology or all those digital currencies for making fake money? ME obviously but hey I didn't really write that open source npm library that is in tonnes of projects now did I?

So thanks for reading my rant. What are developers learning in 2024 given that AI can now convert any language to any other language and the library of babylon is online I think I will go back to python it seems to do well at serving me when I want to have some fun programming and who knows maybe I will get back into writing helpful libraries for corporate software so that when they steal it because open source created this new world then my birthday will be quite the show.

Have you noticed that AI loves to abridge source code though like it gives you hints for the direction but still wants you to fill in the gaps :)