Well getting drunk with friends in the afternoon doesn't seem like it's the answer to life either. I'm 31 and wake up at 5am during the week. Get to the gym before getting into the office at 7:30. Definitely have enough time to get drinks with friends here or there. I'm not staying out all night partying by any means, but there is certainly a way to make it work.
“Looking back over a life of hard work … my only regret is that I didn’t work even harder.”
- H. L. Mencken
Sorry, I don't mean to troll, I just dislike the strawman argument of "[being productive/working/etc] isn't everything in life."
> Well getting drunk with friends in the afternoon doesn't seem like it's the answer to life either.
Wow, the GP didn't say anything about getting drunk, so you managed to turn his comment into "hanging out with friends isn't the answer to life either". I beg to differ, it's a big part of the answer.
Summary: The secret to happiness is good relationships with other people, and the bane to happiness is loneliness. This agrees with my own observations as well.
Definitely! I have hard time understanding my future self, and my future self may have hard time understanding me as of now. People change, and what feels important at medium term (a few years) also changes. There's hardly a single right answer good for all ages.
I'm using React on a few smaller projects where I didn't want to over engineer the whole Flux architecture. I put together the app using Backbone (for the models and collections) and used React for the view layer.
The models and collections worked great as "stores" and I used the simple dispatcher from Flux to handle the actions being sent.
While I really like the Flux pattern, for smaller'ish apps it did seem a bit of overkill.
A couple articles I was referencing for BB and React:
It's all relative. At any moment in time there are going to be "native," fat client, devices that are running more powerful applications than that can be run on a thin client, "web," model. There is always going to be a transition to move those applications to a thin model, for scaleability reasons, and when that happens there is going to be some new software that requires the fat client model again.
Either way, it's about figuring out which model works for the problem you're trying to solve. If you advocate for one, you're missing opportunities in the other.
While I am probably going to use it all the time, I think it's a better development model to have it evolve independently and having the core of backbone stay really simple.
Ha! It's a pendulum that swings in both directions, and I think people are moving on from wasting their time and energy complaining about PHP. Here's what I have learned.
1. Developers complain a lot, and that's a good thing. While it can seem unproductive at times and devolve into flame wars, the truth is you're not likely to choose this profession if you aren't curious and care about the right damn thing happening.
It's just a byproduct of what it takes to be a good dev. We research, we understand, and then we want to stand by our opinions because of that research and understanding. But we can also get lost in that sometimes. It's important to have pragmatism in our toolbelt.
At the end of the day, core maintainers or contributors make sure to cherry pick the best from those arguments. Pull requests are made. Merges happen. Things improve. It's not always pretty, but discourse is like that.
2. The world isn't perfect. Neither are languages. PHP has its share of rough spots, but then it's how you use it. We've all seen some truly awful Ruby on Rails code, just as we've seen some solid, testable PHP code. Your job is understand the deficiencies of a language (any language!) and craft the best code around those limitations.
3. Shiny new things give us blinders. The antithesis to ad hoc PHP might be Ruby on Rails. Yet people discount some drawbacks that are unique (from PHP) to RoR. Do generators, which are encouraged, really help teach a programmer about how their application stack is operating? Maybe you could tell someone to avoid scaffolding. Is Rails faster than well-architected PHP? Hell no, but maybe you could teach someone how to tweak middleware or use JRuby. But you'll notice the same pattern I mentioned in #2: understand deficiencies, create workarounds to those limitations. It's not unique to PHP, or any other language/framework.
And finally...
4. When you are building things meant to be consumed by the general public, more goes into a language decision than the features of that language. You might, for example, have a business requirement to hire up and move very quickly. Are you going to round up a bunch of seasoned, veteren Go engineers in a few weeks to build the next sprint of some great app? It's probably not impossible, but it's not likely either (today). The trick is to solve the problems you actually have.
I'm not advocating everyone use PHP. I'm advocating everyone use the language that best suits their personal or larger business needs. If you care about improving PHP, help make it better. We, the general dev community, are all too busy, considerate, awesome, hard-working, friendly, and creative to spend much time on flame wars. :)
> I mean, how you can feel that burning love when you’re sitting at the table discussing how to use the last twenty dollars in your bank account?
These are types of issues that, IMO, people need to figure our while they are dating, and not just jump into marriage with someone before knowing how they handle tough, down-on-your-luck, situations. How you handle finances, how you divide chores, the dynamic of a family you want... all these things should be figured out before you pop the question, to make sure you're on the same page with someone before you make to commitment to be with them forever.
It's great this guy found happiness with his wife, but that's quite the gamble he took, not knowing those things before getting married.
I think the bigger issue here is they got married during the honeymoon phase of a relationship.
The first 6-12 month's of a good relationship are fantastic. Its exciting, full of lust and you get that lovey feeling with little effort.
However, as you get to know each other more and more the fire starts to go out. The relationship transforms into a deeper companionship. Where originally being yourself was enough you now need to make a small effort to show you care. Do something to make the other's life easier, or give them a small surprise etc. Instead of 'the fire' always being there you need to generate it.
People who don't make the effort get the feeling they aren't loved or start arguing or wake up one day and find out they are sleeping next to a friend.
I have been in a relationship for 9 years and am happy. There have been bad patches but it just takes a bit of perseverance to work through them.
I get the impression a lot of people expect a relationship stays in the honeymoon period or give up to easily when they hit a bad patch. I think it's a bit sad.
"The grass is greener on the other side." Some day's it is... but I have found if you go to that other side and give it a little while often what you originally had was better all along.
>This is the perfect example of everything wrong with modern web design.
This seems to be quite the hyperbole. Sure, it might over use some modern design trends, but there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Also, what is wrong with themes on themeforest? Many are built with great design in mind.
More than anything govt. sites are not friendly, don't organize their content well, and do a horrible job at engaging their users. I would say this site does all of three, making it at least a decently designed and well built site.
"Also, what is wrong with themes on themeforest? Many are built with great design in mind."
That's the issue with cheap templates. They are designed and built by web people with no connection to your organization. You then buy this template and shoehorn your own content, and hopefully goals into a template without ever thinking about what your site should look or work like. Templates serve a purpose at the extreme low end of the market but soon every organization should graduate to a process that does not begin with a template.
Would you use a template as the basis for your entire software project? Would you use a template for your business plan? Certainly there's a case to be made for both, but neither is ideal for anyone seeking success.
When you start a Rails or Django project you're using a template. When you use Bootstrap you're using a template. When you use the business model canvass you're using a template. And forget cheap, those templates are free.
People use templates in successful projects all the time. Don't generalize. I'm sure a lot of sites have found success in their niche using themeforest as well.
If you want to compare apples with apples then it would be better to compare Bootstrap or Rails with some of the "framework" themes (like Genesis) that exist for platforms like WordPress. They stop short of design and mostly provide the designer and developer with a common language.
A complete theme usually has a lot more than just tools, conventions and code examples. It's a complete design, and content implementation, all you have to do is stick in your logo and copy and you're done. Not exactly the same process as using a framework.
Although I also dislike frameworks (Bootstrap high on that list) for the same reasons (shoehorning is encouraged) I don't think it's an appropriate comparison.
> You then buy this template and shoehorn your own content, and hopefully goals into a template without ever thinking about what your site should look or work like.
Templates work fine if you simply reverse the order here: think carefully about how you want the site to look and work, then look to see if there is a template that is reasonably close. If there is, it's a huge savings in cost and time--even if you have to alter the template a bit. Graphic design and front-end coding are expensive by the hour.
Templates are tool. They can be used or abused. Used well, they can save you weeks of work.
There is a lot of convergence in website goals. Blogs aren't that different from each other, portfolios aren't that different from each other. Sure, you'll take on more constraints than building your own from scratch, but you also might be a lot faster, which often outweighs everything.
Great design is significantly more than good/trendy aesthetics.
I don't think UX and IA can be minimized and made generic enough to fit into a one-size-fits-all theme. You still need to be thoughtful in how you design and display information.
I've gotta disagree simply because a lot of the people posting to ThemeForest are just trying to make a buck on their hobby - so many of those themes look exactly alike; they're not spending significant time thinking about the usability of their designs and just applying trends. TemplateMonster back-in-the-day was more reminiscent of designers with experience creating unique enough templates to be modified/used for multiple types of purposes.
> In some respects, the plethora of choice this problem represents is the power of the web, but overall I think it does the web a disservice because there isn't enough weight put behind a single platform.
Fair argument (I guess?) but the opinion comes down to, do you prefer an open and ever-changing ecosystem that has no limits on what you can build and how you can build it; or do you prefer a contained ecosystem dictated by a few powerful stakeholders who subtly apply their own methodologies and beliefs, to shape the capabilities and limits of the platform?
The latter seems like a slippery slope and would eventually serve the the powerful stakeholders rather than the people building the platform. The former, while it may require a higher learning curve, puts more competition between technologies that enhance the platform, and doesn't dictate what or how things can be built, serving the developers and users above all else.
I started freelancing a little over 2 years ago and have more than doubled how much I was making at my previous agency job. A few tips would be:
- Save up 3 - 6 months "salary" before you jump-ship. While you are doing that, build your portfolio and start lining up work. If after 3 - 6 months you can't find work, you can always go back to working for someone else again.
- Hire an accountant. For the amount of stress they reduce, they are worth every penny.
- Establish good relationships with a few agencies close by, where you could possibly do contract work. You may not be able to charge them as much, but having them as a fall back when you are slow is nice.
- On a related note: Don't consider contract work through other agencies bad. From my experience, one agency gets work from another agency, who gets work from another agency, etc.. There is good money to be made being the production guy.
“Looking back over a life of hard work … my only regret is that I didn’t work even harder.” - H. L. Mencken
Sorry, I don't mean to troll, I just dislike the strawman argument of "[being productive/working/etc] isn't everything in life."