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Developers of the past worked towards the title of webmaster. A webmaster can manage a server, write the code and also be a graphic artist. Developers want to

by ipaddr 2y ago

Developers of the past worked towards the title of webmaster. A webmaster can manage a server, write the code and also be a graphic artist. Developers want to do it all. What has changed is micromanaging of daily standup which reshapes work into neat packages for conversation but kills a non linear flow and limits exploration making things exactly as requested instead of what could be better.

SoftTalker 2y ago
I never thought of a webmaster as meaning that. When I think of webmaster I think of a person who updates the content on a website using a CMS of some sort. Maybe they know a bit of HTML and CSS, how to copy assets to the web server, that sort of thing. But they are not sysadmins or programmers in the conventional sense. Maybe it just varies by employer.
- llIIllIIllIIl 2y ago
  That’s just a more junior mastery of a true webmaster.
- ehnto 2y ago
  They were talking about ye olden day I believe. Webmasters used to do every aspect of web development, hosting and all. There are still people who do that at smaller companies, but you wouldn't call them a webmaster anymore.
chrismarlow9 2y ago
What has also changed in my opinion is the vast landscape of tooling and frameworks at every level of the stack. We now have containers that run in VMs that run on physical servers. And languages built on top of JavaScript and backed by Shadow Dom and blah blah. Now sure I could easily skip all that and stick a static page on a cdn that points to a lambda and call it a day. But the layers are still there. I'm afraid only more of this is coming with AI in full swing and fully expect a larger scale internet outage to happen at some point that will be the result of a subtle bug in all this complexity that no single person can fix because AI wrote it. There's too much stuff in the stack. Can we stop adding and remove some of it?
- immibis 2y ago
  > a lambda A CGI script, even, which Lambda is the cloudified version of.
neom 2y ago
This comment had me laughing pretty hard, and thanks for making me feel old. Anyway, I guess I'm a "webmaster" in theory even tho I've not worked on web since early 2000s, lamp stack handy++ tho. made me laugh because: was a Supabase meetup recently and some kid told me he was full stack, but he can't ssh into a server? I'm supa confused what fullstack means these days.
- ehnto 2y ago
  I have stopped calling myself a full stack developer, because the meaning and the role are kind of ambiguous now. Clients don't know what they can talk to me about (everything), and PMs seem to be unsure of what I can be assigned to (anything). In fairness as well, the frontend tooling landscape has become so complex that while I'm capable of jumping in, I am in no way an efficient fronted developer off the rip.
  - duggan 2y ago
    The tooling has become complex, sure, but so have capabilities and expectations. I used to “make websites” in the 2000s, then stopped for about 15 years to focus on backend and infrastructure. Have been getting back into front end the last few months — there was a good bit of learning and unlearning, but the modern web stack is amazingly productive. Next.js, Tailwind, and Supabase in particular. Last time I checked in to frontend dev, CSS directives fit on an A4 sheet, valid XHTML was a nerd flex and rounded corners were painstakingly crafted from tables and gifs. Frontend is a dream now :)
ang_cire 2y ago
> Developers of the past I'm only 36, but you're making me feel extremely old. To me, "developers of the past" were the people working on COBOL and JCL and FORTRAN and DB2, on z/OS or System 390/370/360, to whom "RPG" was only a 4GL[1], not a type of game, and there was no webmaster or graphic designer involved... not some dotcom era dev in the 90s when "webmasters" became a widespread thing. Here's an interesting article on webmasters and their disappearance below[2]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG 2: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/what-happened-to-the-webmaster/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/what-happened-to-t...

by ipaddr 2y ago

SoftTalker 2y ago

I never thought of a webmaster as meaning that. When I think of webmaster I think of a person who updates the content on a website using a CMS of some sort. Maybe they know a bit of HTML and CSS, how to copy assets to the web server, that sort of thing. But they are not sysadmins or programmers in the conventional sense. Maybe it just varies by employer.

llIIllIIllIIl 2y ago
That’s just a more junior mastery of a true webmaster.
ehnto 2y ago
They were talking about ye olden day I believe. Webmasters used to do every aspect of web development, hosting and all. There are still people who do that at smaller companies, but you wouldn't call them a webmaster anymore.

chrismarlow9 2y ago

What has also changed in my opinion is the vast landscape of tooling and frameworks at every level of the stack. We now have containers that run in VMs that run on physical servers. And languages built on top of JavaScript and backed by Shadow Dom and blah blah. Now sure I could easily skip all that and stick a static page on a cdn that points to a lambda and call it a day. But the layers are still there. I'm afraid only more of this is coming with AI in full swing and fully expect a larger scale internet outage to happen at some point that will be the result of a subtle bug in all this complexity that no single person can fix because AI wrote it. There's too much stuff in the stack. Can we stop adding and remove some of it?

immibis 2y ago
> a lambda A CGI script, even, which Lambda is the cloudified version of.

neom 2y ago

This comment had me laughing pretty hard, and thanks for making me feel old. Anyway, I guess I'm a "webmaster" in theory even tho I've not worked on web since early 2000s, lamp stack handy++ tho. made me laugh because: was a Supabase meetup recently and some kid told me he was full stack, but he can't ssh into a server? I'm supa confused what fullstack means these days.

ehnto 2y ago
I have stopped calling myself a full stack developer, because the meaning and the role are kind of ambiguous now. Clients don't know what they can talk to me about (everything), and PMs seem to be unsure of what I can be assigned to (anything). In fairness as well, the frontend tooling landscape has become so complex that while I'm capable of jumping in, I am in no way an efficient fronted developer off the rip.
- duggan 2y ago
  The tooling has become complex, sure, but so have capabilities and expectations. I used to “make websites” in the 2000s, then stopped for about 15 years to focus on backend and infrastructure. Have been getting back into front end the last few months — there was a good bit of learning and unlearning, but the modern web stack is amazingly productive. Next.js, Tailwind, and Supabase in particular. Last time I checked in to frontend dev, CSS directives fit on an A4 sheet, valid XHTML was a nerd flex and rounded corners were painstakingly crafted from tables and gifs. Frontend is a dream now :)

ang_cire 2y ago

> Developers of the past I'm only 36, but you're making me feel extremely old. To me, "developers of the past" were the people working on COBOL and JCL and FORTRAN and DB2, on z/OS or System 390/370/360, to whom "RPG" was only a 4GL[1], not a type of game, and there was no webmaster or graphic designer involved... not some dotcom era dev in the 90s when "webmasters" became a widespread thing. Here's an interesting article on webmasters and their disappearance below[2]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG 2: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/what-happened-to-the-webmaster/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/what-happened-to-t...