Experience can be a bad thing. It is this that makes junior developers such a positive part of any team. Folks from different backgrounds who never learned the bad habits of those that came before them.
By bad habits, I mean little things where I use a certain HTML tag or attribute that you'd only use if you started using it before the other thing existed. These things stick.
To all the code newbies out there, you have a perspective I can't possibly have anymore, and a certain skillset orientation that I will never have. Bring this awareness with confidence into your next job interview.
Geocities is definitely my coding origin story. Folks that came up on Commodore 64 or anything else have their own versions of this. We still bring a lot of value, so don't think of us as dinosaurs, but we need new blood all the time in this industry!
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Thanks for a ray of hope to hear as a new developer at a not fresh out of college age.
The blink tag was great and so was the marquee, I will never forget those days.
👏🏻Being open to contamination while building opinions on the best ways to solve problems is the balance every developer should keep aiming for.
Bonus to those Geocities days: the first time I was faced with coding an HTML email, I didn't need to have the reliance on tables for layout explained to me at all 🤣
Viva la
table!I see what you are saying, and mostly agree (reason why I like to collaborate with a junior right now and be exposed to that kind of energy). But I've also seen juniors attaching onClick handlers to spans...
I call bullshit. I think I'm from the same "era" as you are. One of the reasons I frequent dev.to is to, kind of, get this perspective.
Most content is geared towards frontend-ers, especially web-frontend-ers (just to show my alleviated age). I have vested my background in tools and frameworks, especially backends.
I frequent the frontend newbie content, to kind-of keep up with what ever they introduce this time. Which is still quite a lot. But do I have bad habits? Not really.
I have some established habits, and I am learning new better habits. I started with
The only bad habit is to stay stuck in time with your mindset. Note, You do not have to keep up with everything.
*) I work on enterprise software where you ESR/LTS releases of browsers are "fancy". Usability trumps looks by an enormous distance. If I was working in a more consumer focused marked I would be looking at different things.
As I like to say, I have bad coding habits that are old enough to drink.
Though, sometimes, being the dinosaur can work for you...
(New to Platform Person): "Why do you use <X> construct in your code."
Me: "A couple decades worth of ingrained habit and I know that it works everywhere"
NtPP: "Ok. Mind if I use this newer method?"
Me: "Sure. If stuff works and lowers the amount of effort we have to expend, 'go for it'."
Me: "Remember when when you asked me why I used <X> construct and I said that 'I know that it works eveywhere'?"
NePP: "Yes...?"
Me: "Know that customer that was bitching about the tool you delivered?"
NtPP: "Yes...?"
Me: "Ironically, the fix for their problem was to use the method you originally questioned."
In Zen Buddhism we have something called “beginners mind.” You must always keep a beginners mind.
There’s a parable I love...I’ll update it for the context.
A coding expert goes to a coding guru to learn more about development. He says “I’m an expert in web development. I’ve been doing it for a decade. But you’re so much better. I want to learn from you.” And so the guru says “Of course. Sit down and let’s start with a cup of coffee.”
He pulls out a couple mugs and heats up the water, brews the coffee, and starts pouring a cup of coffee for his new student.
The mug fills up and he keeps pouring. Coffee is spilling everywhere.
The expert’s like “Dude what are you doing? You’re spilling coffee everywhere. Stop pouring.”
The guru says “You are like this mug. You are so full that I can not put any more knowledge into you. You must go empty your mug and then come back to me.”
Hope that helps.
Another way of saying this there is:
I still have bad habits. Knowingly. I know there's a better way to do it. I'm too lazy to look it up. I'll go to my room with dinner.
Commodore 64. Those were the days. Oh yeah.
I worked with Geocities as well.
There will be a day when someone will write about 'bad habits from when I was writing those dinosaur React apps'. Nothing bad about it. As anyone can see, React is shiny, popular and a nice piece of tech. Just as Geocities was, back in 1990's.
Fast-forwarding 20 years won't make React a bad thing today. Just as fast-forwarding 20 years don't make Geocities something bad in the past.
I know it's not what you meant. Just wanted to get these thoughts out! 😉
👨💻 gifcities.org/?q=coding
SAME (Geocities was amazing for the time)! bold vs strong, i vs em... I still remember when CSS came out and thinking it was AMAZING... and now I overuse divs and struggle to remember that semantic HTML is a lot more than just arias (article, aside, details... I had to look those up just to remember they are a thing). Fight the old-school fight daily!
I value less experienced engineers because of this. I might have seen 15 different ways that what you're building is going to become spaghetti 6 months from now, but I'll also see a tag, or a function form or something that I just didn't know existed in that code review too. It helps your whole team to be better when you have that mix of experience. I'll help with the structure (and it's important to explain so teammates aren't forced to learn by experience) but they will help with the syntax (and it's important to get the reasoning for using it so I can keep growing as a dev too).
geocities 🤣
I still tend to overuse divs since I started back with HTML4
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