Great reads, as always. A few points stuck out to me.
Maybe Iām wrong to think that HTML and CSS are themselves relatively simple, and that all the rest of the rigamarole that running your own website entails is the hard part.
I agree that actually hosting your HTML and CSS is the real challenge. I am reminded of another blog post, Static site hosting hurdles. Iām not sure what can be done to make it simpler for non-tech people, but stuff like Neocities is in the right direction.
I canāt help but suspect that if youāre passionate about working in tech, youāre not actually smart enough to do so. If youāre a techie and this offends you, then riddle me this: if techies are so goddamned smart, why arenāt we unionized?
I feel like Iām going insane whenever discussion about tech unions comes up, especially in the CS career related subreddits. There is a lot of fundamental misunderstandings of how unions work. Iāve seen the argument that ālow performersā shouldnāt be protected from being fired by the union, as if unions prevent anyone from getting fired ever. Also note that OP is never the ālow performerā that needs protection. I also see people upset at the idea that a tech union would lower salaries for people nearing the ceiling, which may be true, but improving salaries for everyone else is a good tradeoff (and a moral one, I would argue) to make. Itās a real crabs in a bucket situation.
Well, that custom HTTP server discussed in āstatic site hosting hurdlesā probably isnāt the right way to go if we want to make it easier for regular folks to build/maintain their own websites. I mean, I code for a living and I still had to read that post three times to make sense of it.
I think the problem is that a lot of techies think entirely too highly of themselves, and have mistaken Ayn Rand for a philosopher. Drinking that particular flavor of Kool-Aid is dangerous.
Congratulations on your wins! Glad to see you celebrate your own accomplishments too.
Glad to hear that freeCodeCampās responsive web design course became the first online course you completed. freeCodeCamp was where I started to learn web development seriously after attempting to code my own website from scratch, so Iām happy to see someone else in the personal web benefits from freeCodeCampās courses too.
IMHO, the web is everything. The personal, the corporate, the human-curated, the AI generated slop. Itās the full gamut of hosted creation. I appreciate wanting some way of better understanding some conceptual idea of authenticity or trustworthiness for the pages that weāre exploring, but honestly, that runs contrary to the very first description of the internet that I ever knew: āOn the internet, no one knows that youāre a dog.ā In other words, no one knows who is lying, so approach everything with a modicum of critical thinking. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost this. As with many things, I blame Facebook.
At some point, we likely wonāt be able to discern between fact and fiction, which is incredibly empowering of the people and corporations that want to sell us lies. But I agree with your assertion that setting up an authority isnāt an acceptable (or tenable) approach; weāre moving into a āpost-truthā society, for better or worse, and establishing an authority to tell us whatās true is just another avenue to corruption/exploitation. Weāve already got enough for that with the media and our politicians.
TL;DR: Focus on smaller, personal connections and use your judgment to make calls on whether to believe something on the internet. Thatās probably the best we can achieve.
The Weekly Wrap Up is up! Couple of cool links, talked about what I did with my site, whatās going on in general and talked about what I read, watched and listened to. You know, the usual!