Nothing beats the feeling of installing a high rated module and crashing the entire system.

I bit my tongue amid the Drupal love upthread. I wouldn't seriously suggest using these things for anything if you can do any programming. IME, CMS makes 75% convenient at the cost of making 15% of what's normally easy very difficult and the final 10% either impossible or prohibitively expensive.

I do agree with _dave_'s thought in a literal sense.

yeah, initial problem is that you have to spend some time learning the 'platform' so that you know where to go to do the simple things

You mean like, add a div? :/

I've been working on learning some of this PL/pgSQL. Sort of helping out the db girl at work. I have to say I think the language is pretty okay. It's pretty simple but there are quite a few powerful things that can be done with it as well. Kind of feels like working with some DSL in C.

Do companies ever use this stuff? For example, most people know that network latency can be a bottle-neck, so it may make sense to do as much with the database as possible within the engine. Seems like a strange question with the current crop of ORMs and other plug-ins.

My first job used a lot of plsql. The main reason being that there were a number of clients and the database was the one shared place where business logic could be reused. Performance was also a consideration.

Those decisions were made before my time and in a different era but I think now it would be a no brainer to just build services to contain business logic and to use a horizontally scalable db to mitigate the need for crazy performance. I don't know if there are a lot of cases where I think it would be a good idea to use plsql.

Def. a lot of that in the wild (especially widespread with Oracle DBs). Can be a pain to integrate.
But yeah a ton of (legacy) code in the wild.

It was a ****ing nightmare to integrate. We only had so many dbs and the code has to be on the db to use. So if you were writing stuff it was usually happening on a machine that other people were using. You could play games like name it something unique and modify your client code to call your personal package name but that gets messy fast.

And of course if you had 2-3 people all needing to change similar code it was just a ****ing nightmare. Add to that that git didn't exist and we were using CVS so you couldn't even easily keep up to date with other people's changes.

Development is so much better now.

You guys were using the database as a version control system?

Interestingly, I've seen a few job postings looking for PL/pgSQL in the wild, and was once contacted by someone looking for it though I had nothing of the sort on my resume.

Anyways, depend on me to learn another worthless language. I may as well get on to learning brain****.

No, the code was stored in CVS but in order to test your code you had to deploy it to a database and we only had a very limited number of those (back when people had to set up physical machines and you had to pay stupid licensing fees).

So if two people were working on the same plsql package you had to coordinate a lot because when you deployed the latest version of your code it overwrote whatever was there before. And of course if you made a change to the API anybody that was running client code that used that API had to update their code at the exact same time (there are some ways to mitigate this in practice, but many of those are ugly too).

What's my best bet for a css/javascript framework if I want to build a strict m.domain.com type mobile website?

I'm almost done with our prototype web app, and we're getting an iOS app contracted out through a local development company. I want to support a lighter weight mobile browser version of our site, but have never built a straight mobile only version of a site before.

Bootstrap?

jQuery mobile

JQuery Mobile likely dominates, but gonna throw out a link to Dojo since JQuery is already mentioned and Dojo is awesome: http://dojotoolkit.org/features/mobile

Hi guys, hope someone can give some insight to my situation.

I'm currently going to school (for a non-CS-related major) and work part-time at a hard manual labor job that I hate. Life being life I am not in a great position to quit, however I am hoping that I might be able to transition to some type of freelance web development.

the bad:

- I'm pretty much a total newb. I remember some HTML from high school, and I just started Python to try it out, and I like it but doubt I'll be able to do anything meaningful for a while.

the good:

- I don't need much. Basically, if I can make > $1k/mo. working ~80-100 hrs, I could comfortably switch.

If I can make the switch in a few months I would be happy, but even within a year is better than never imo. That said, I don't really know anything about freelance web dev, like if you need a portfolio etc. just to get started.

I assume for my purposes, it's best to put Python on hold and focus on client-side stuff like HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc? I have no clue about the market for freelance web dev and what people can charge starting out, but are my goals realistic for a reasonably competent human being? Any other advice appreciated, thanks.

Freelance is tough for stuff like that. Even $10/hour in the USA is going to be hard to get from nothing. Contract (40 hrs per week) is much easier. But if you're just looking for money I guess I'd learn Wordpress (and not necessarily HTML/CSS/JS/PHP) really really well and approach local businesses and all that. But that sounds like hell.

hmm, what would you suggest for pursuing a contract in my position? Is doing something like the Treehouse courses worthwhile? (What did you do?) I don't know if I can swing 40 hrs/week with a full class load but maybe I can find some motivation if I know what's at the end of the rainbow.

BTW, congrats on the job, that's pretty cool. From browsing job listings online it seems like most places want 5 years experience (and knowledge of at least half a dozen languages) for every position besides Jr. developer. Is it mostly based on the portfolio you showed them?

I think there is realistically a market to customize a wordpress template with the company's logo and language and pretty much nothing else and charge $500-$1k for it

Thats 90% hustling for customers and 10% development though. If thats your thing cool but yeah, not for me.

I got my first jobs through recruiters for short term contracts, actually, all my jobs minus my current one. I count those experiences as super valuable - I was able to learn so much beyond just coding from that.

I learned everything I could about modern front end webdev (codecademy, tutsplus, some books), and applied it to making projects that I posted to github, including making a flashy portfolio site. I guess I did get lucky in that I had some contacts for a couple people that I was able to get some work in for and was able to include in a portfolio, but you could volunteer for that I'm sure. I don't really feel lucky I got my current job, I was obviously the best candidate out of many in that I could show I was capable of the job, I had an actual web page that showed code that I wrote myself, and I interview pretty well so after a 30 minute phone screen I had a 40 minute interview a couple days later and they hired me that day as contract to hire.

There's 6 other developers at my fortune 100 company and other than the new team lead who came in after me, none of them have ever used Git. So thats your real competition.

Yea I wouldn't do it either, but I'm just going off him still being in school and wanting the money.

Is git really that impressive to employers? I believe it's necessary to know for any professional job,however it should only take a day to learn really.

So I think not knowing git is not a big deal IMO.

The flip side is that not knowing something necessary that would only take you a day to learn seems kind of silly.

But I agree its probably not that important for an employer. I certainly don't remember ever caring about it when looking at resumes.

learning programming in a school setting and we're using Alice as a language, well, as a 'language'.

Final project needed to include an accumulator, which we've done before, but when I tried it this time it just wasn't working properly. I assumed I could increment a variable in a method each time the method is called, but that just didn't work. In the end I had to loop the method and increment the variable at the end of a while loop.

Is it possible to increment a variable when called as an event or no? Perhaps this is just a limitation of the IDE we're working in. I can't do some other things that I figure would be fairly straightforward, like using the mouse to move the camera around.

Probably posting the code sample or something the illustrates the concept you are trying implement would be helpful in getting an answer. I am not familiar with Alice so my wild ass guess is that it is a scope issue with the variable. The variable you are incrementing goes out of scope when you exit the method. Again just a guess.

Never heard of Alice before

Most job postings seem to ask for it. Download sourcetree, problem solved.