When I was in third grade, there was a scholastic book fair that was selling the book "Make Your Own Web Page! A Guide for Kids"[1]. The internet for nine year old me was this mysterious, opaque thing; I had no idea that you could just "make" a web page. I'm not sure I know what I thought it was, but I guess I assumed it was reserved for businesses or something, and I didn't realize it was something that a kid could do if they wanted to. It wasn't terribly expensive so I asked my mom and she bought it for me.
I read through it and was immediately hooked. I know HTML isn't a "programming language", but in my nine year old mind I felt like some uber-hacker writing code and seeing it render on the screen made me feel so cool. It didn't hurt that the internet was still novel enough (~1999-2000) that my third grade teacher was extremely impressed that I did this by myself after I presented it to class for show and tell, and she actually called my parents to tell them how impressed she was.
Later I got into proper programming with a bootleg copy of "Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" [2], a book on ActionScript I had found at Goodwill to use with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004, and a C++ book that I got for my birthday one year. I eventually became reasonably ok at software stuff and I've built a decent career out of it.
I actually tracked down a copy of that original "Make Your Own Web Page!" on eBay and read through it again about two years ago, and while the HTML in there is dated and it's not terribly useful anymore, reading through it I couldn't stop smiling.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Page-Guide-Kids/dp/04391340...
[2] I'm actually not sure if it was bootleg. I didn't just download a PDF, it was a website that seemed to just host the entirety of the content of the Sams book I think.
This got a laugh out of me. The whole scenario was both hilarious and surreal from start to finish. It's a wonder what people get hung up on sometimes, even if getting hung up on it makes them look bad.
Instead he made himself look like an idiot.
Great article.
Nothing ever changes. I spent half a day just getting some SDR development stuff to work just now, long live Python code with baked in hard dependencies on particular versions of obscure libraries... In the end it worked, but what a mess.
It's as if toy languages are suddenly used to make the backbone of our lives.
I can understand JS to an extent because of first class functions, but Lua is like a better, properly designed JS and also has them.
Because those "toy" languages delivered the goods, while the "serious" ones fumbled their way big time. It was very funny seeing how lambda-the-ultimate.org forum was a Drupal installation (meaning both PHP and said Drupal).
One place I worked decided that it'd be easier to build an AMI and provision quasi-ephemeral EC2 instances to developers instead of putting the time in to pare down the landfill of dev dependencies they had. This whole process was, of course, orchestrated by a custom CLI that would itself randomly break in odd ways.
Fun times.
The reason they gave was “Unable to perform basic environment setup”.
Some people are just born stupid.
Cto was eventually fired for trying to steal the company IP and he went on to fail upward making a security camera company infra famously insecure and got a ton of very valuable stock for it.
Life is weird!
I feel like this is a real barrier to getting effective contributions from outside of existing team members. Some colleagues seem to see this as an advantage.
Seems like it wasn't just the processor that reset.
https://www.soft-land.org/cgi-bin/doc.pl?mode=setpreferredla...
Looks like the .com is for sale, in case you didn’t notice. https://sedo.com/search/?keyword=Susam.com
You could probably acquire it (for less than asking price IMO) if you have a sentimental attachment. Nothing wrong with your .net, of course.
Thanks for sharing the stories.
I miss the days of having confidence in people to fill the gaps to do their job. Now we demand junior engineers to system design Twitter and memorize algo tricks for leetcode tests. These were useless measures before, hopefully LLMs finally kill them off for good.
Juniors?