Vanderson

Posting this on a lark. I don't know if I want to be hired.

I've run my own business for 20 years. I've had employees and contractors. Dog fooded my own software. Failed at many things. I was an IT manager for a few years. And I've worked a few days a small dairy farm helping dehorn calfs and milk some cows. For a year and half I've worked at a group home working with teen boys that have a rough start in life. And I started doing this because my tech experience had gotten unpleasant. But, bad supervisors are bad supervisors.

So, are there really any decent people to work for? I've gained an unusual set of leadership skills this past year in an unexpected way, and I've been a coder for a long enough time to look up to the gray beards for wisdom, but I feel I was better at concepts and system design than coding. I made a mobile game or two this past year, just because I needed to keep my head in the tech world. What does any of this qualify someone for these days? Cheers!

Advanced results require advanced skills.

CSS is one of my favorite languages. And the only way I can consider CSS to be difficult is if you have no experience with HTML. If you try to do HTML by hand, then doing CSS by hand on top of HTML by hand is really easy and wonderful. And this is truly where you gain the fundamental framework for "getting CSS".

I learned to take it personally but not react badly. This way I am not trying to counter a normal human experience, but instead changing something I have total control over, my response.

This is a fight worth having because the more you do it, the better you get at it and you feel less and less attacked you feel when criticism comes your way.

The first few times doing this are the hardest. But after doing this for some time, I rarely feel criticisms are personal anymore. This also affected how people talk to me, and they make it less personal. It's an odd combination of success from both sides.

A key point to all of this, was I needed to make my criticisms less personal.

A manager told me a key point in a private conversation once that help me change my attitude.

He said "I don't like talking about people, I like talking about processes".

I had just been critical of a "person" in the conversation, and I realized how much easier it was to talk about a "process" with my criticism after I took his hint to heart. And others took some time to follow my lead on this, and for me to be consistent about this change of process.

I could certainly put you in touch with my friend. What I meant by "offline" is that I really don't want to put my email address into a public forum to be spammed. Any suggestions how to share contact info?

Well, by "science based" my understanding is that they could prove the system worked to effectively teach kids to read with predictable results.

I have a friend who I met in college who got his PhD working under Zig, which is how people who knew Engelmann called him. And this friend gave me a copy of his book "How to teach your child to read in 100 lessons" and I used it to teach my own kids.

I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)

What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?

Here's a video of Siegfried Engelmann, who is mentioned in this article, demonstrating how he had taught inner city grade school age kids that were considered "unteachable" (I can't recall the exact label I was told) doing algebra... live. (about 20 min in) I think they are about 4th or 5th grade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SjFsimywA

Many people didn't like the strict requirement of his reading methods, from what I have been told.

Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on reading mistakes, etc...

I recommend just starting from scratch. As a programmer at heart I find programming like playing with Legos. While I needed to understand how all the underlying parts worked, I didn't need instructions on how to build a specific larger thing.

I found MDN to indispensible in learning to make web apps. Everything from learning the basics of string/array/date/etc... objects, to modern ES6 modules.

JS/HTML/CSS - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

CSS - https://css-tricks.com/guides/

As far as actually building apps? After 20+ years of programming, I found my own light weight JS code turned into a framework over time for building apps the way I wanted to. Mostly vanilla JS.

But it didn't stay vanilla JS because too many things are hard on your own. Since everything you build you have to maintain, I found it easier to use jQuery years ago with all it's extra tools. Today? I am still removing jQuery from my code, as vanilla JS does everything jQuery did for me. (I stopped using their widgets as soon as browsers supported features by default, like a proper date picker, etc...)

So, my advice, start from scratch. learn all the pieces one at a time as you need them. This will keep you from getting overwhelmed.

Are their good resources for these from scratch online? Sure, but maybe a book is a good idea here, as it forces a more basic linear learning process if you start at the beginning. Not sure I'd take this route, but it may work for some people.

To your original question - no, I don't know of single source. But no, you do not need Node. You can create an html file and load it directly in a browser, you don't need a server to get started. But this is just step one...

I actually have not touched any of the code yet as we are using a 3rd party developer to help us. (I will likely work on templates and other things down the road)

My experience when evaluating Odoo was using Studio, which I have found can really mess up your Odoo instance.

Are you working with Odoo code directly?

We are doing an Odoo implementation right now. (a few months in)

What did you find is a mess about Odoo? And why is customizing it a nightmare?

Thank you! I haven't tried it yet, but this was one of the only things that I sorely missed when I went from Windows to Linux.

Same here. I am really, really hopeful there is a drop in replacement for ULIDs if they ever get abandoned.

At one time if you even _looked up_ the availability of a domain name they would immediately register it so if you tried to then register it at Namecheap or GoDaddy the name was taken already.

That should be illegal. (I have not bothered testing if their system still does this)

To be clear, I agree with your assessment and I would not recommend an agency unless you are a huge company as well. It's a mis-match of interests and goals.

The work I did as a web programmer for an agency (freelance) was similarly imbalanced with many "leaders" telling me what to do, (ie, project lead heavy, 1 designer, 1 programmer) and it was a mess and I won't bother with it again.

You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I'd argue you can run into the exact same problems as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale.

In this comment:

> There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I declined them all and told them to focus on the design I’d approved. I’m glad I did because they’d probably still be working on the website today.

I think you need to do this with every project reguardless of the size of the team you are working with.

Design companies seem to want to make customers feel like they are unskilled / unable to make design decisions for themselves, but maybe this is all experts? And I can say I have had very stubborn customers in the past, and it was good for everyone involved to have a customer that knows what they want and expects it, even if the designer doesn't really like the results as much as their own ideas.

While I agree with your list, it's not _always_ going to be 90/10. Day to day work is the opposite, 10/90, especially if you have a lot of production to get done. (then it can be 100% fun for stretches of time)

It's the feast or famine issue. When you don't have enough work, you are required to do sales to stay in business.

Do enough sales, and have enough repeat work, and you may find you have no time for sales, and may not want any more customers. It all depends on your customer base and the type of work you do.

Also, I loved repeat/consistent work from known customers because the documentation and paperwork burden plummets dramatically. Sometimes to nothing more than a phone call/email to start work, and invoice when it's done.

I think you are agreeing with the article, but the details are different. I like how he distinguishes between specific use case, user generated content, or part of the site design.

> So, which method should we use?

> We've got one solution, aspect-ratio, which is CSS-based. And the other solution, presentational hinting, which uses width and height attributes. The question is very similar to "should this image be a <img> or a CSS background-image?" and the answer is the same: Is it content or design?

Focusing on other people will take your focus off yourself.

I have found satisfaction in helping others. The less personal time I have, the more I value it and the more satisfying life generally is. Also, this is very likely temporary, as your kids get older your life will change with them. They will have more and more adult and complicated life needs.

I found that forcing myself to do things differently based on other people's advice (especially when I didn't feel like it) often brought extremely unexpected results. But there is a massive inertia with changing who you are and the day to day choices you make.

That's kind of you, I appreciate that. I think I am going to redo some things to target the market it serves better and maybe I will post a "Show HN" here.

I hesitate to even post here about my software, but "web designer first" is a key idea behind the CMS I've worked on for some time now.

https://archetypewebsites.com/

A key premise is that the designer decides where things go, and the content editors really just want forms to fill out to get content where the designer says it should go. But like any system, there is full WYSIWYG editable regions as well. (where the pink blinky text will show up...)

I've not marketed Archetype widely (but I went through Startup School a few times with YC) because of the same reasons every other developer has, Archetype has warts.

Nothing is in a vacuum, and employees (myself included) feel the opposite responsibility. I want a paycheck and to get that I need my employer to stay in business. There is a synergy there.

Maybe this is a scale issue. As a single owner of a business I feel personally responsible, and my actions in business are the same as in my personal life. But with a business I share ownership with, I have less personal responsibility, therefore by default I am simply not responsible (and feel less so) about the effects the business has.

Multiply this out to thousands of shareholders, where this connection of ownership -> responsibility towards employees dilutes to the point of non-existence.

I don't know what the remote version of this is, but instead of having an "after work" event, we found that having a lunch or event during work hours was far more valuable. While it's only been done a few times it seems that people really just want to go home after work, so the current thinking (subject to change) is that any "fun" thing needs to be during paid time and not disrupt family and personal time.

After all, employee happiness from a company perspective, is really primarily for the benefit of the company so paying for it, in time and resources, should be an acceptable expense.

Privately owned companies have the direct responsibility to care for their employee's and view their employee's as necessary partners to the company's success helps avoid _some_ of what you are describing. This is reliant on decent ownership of course.

From a family business started by my great grandfather, been running for over 100 years.

Things I learned from my dad and grand parents.

1. Being decent to people will cover all kinds of other problems.

2. A great reputation for doing good work is probably the best sales tool to have.

3. You can pay your people well if you charge premium rates. (and do premium or higher quality work)

4. If you pay your people well you just have a generally happier work force.

5. If you trust your people you don't have to micro-manage them.

6. Giving trust to people can be hard sometimes when things don't go well. (but you need to keep doing it anyways, even when you get taken advantage of from time to time)

7. Hiring mature and decent people fixes a lot of problems in advance.

8. Having a happy work environment is more important than efficiency.

9. The higher up you are, the first you are to take a pay cut, provides respect, stability and confidence in the rest of the company.

10. Don't beat up your vendors on price, and when things get rough, they will take care of you.

There is a lot more.

Me personally:

1. Being technically minded I had to learn to just hang out and talk with people. This was hard because I felt it was inefficient, but the long term, knowing people personally helped when there was difficult technical issues to solve while working with them.

2. Don't make changes to other peoples lives without consulting them first or at least giving them notice (if they don't have a choice). Changes to software, their computer, their job role, etc... Too many horror stories about this kind of thing really frustrating people. Thankfully, I avoided many of these issues by learning from others before making these kinds of mistakes to often.

3. It can take time to really understand a customer or a business. It's just hard to be patient as a technically minded person to sit and understand why something is done when it seems to be done so poorly.

4. Everything doesn't have to be fixed. I thoroughly enjoy fixing and improving things, but sometimes it's just fine to let something be clunky. Why? Because sometimes that clunky thing will stay working under every possible difficult circumstance, and an efficient issue requires calling me when it breaks...

5. Stand down. I've had to give up on very important issues because it would have had too much impact on other people. I wanted to fix product ids because they were based on a 1980s limitation, but the fight to win this change would cause too much turmoil, so I let it go, and I am glad I did, because I never really had to use these product ids myself anyways, and my concerns were theoretical.

6. Patience on change. I've found that when I see something I want to improve (from sales processes to manufacturing to IT related items) that if I bring up the issue to those involved, offer some ideas, and then leave it alone. When everyone now knows there is a solution waiting in the background, they start to notice the issues more keenly (instead of the frog in the pot) and then when they've had enough, they will be motivated for change instead of me pushing people towards it.

MDN is the single most useful and impactful site in my webdev/design career. Above all things, I want this site to stick around and exist.

Some comments seem to be critical of any change. And while I don't like some of the visual changes, overall I think it's going in the right direction.

Most importantly, I want MDN to stay online and whatever they need to do (within reason of course) to keep it free, open, searchable and existing, I am on board with.

Thank you. It was really hard to deal with when all the new code stuff was Node based. But since I stuck with a principle to keep things as simple as possible and this balanced my concerns some.

Results are what mattered and I think we've seen massive shifts in perspective in our industry over the past 20 years. Changing everything from code versioning systems, databases, back and front end languages, all the mix of build systems. There was a lot to avoid changing to for the sake of change.

And sometimes you wonder if you are missing something because you can't see the value in changing. (ie, GIT was obvious from SVN, PHP to Node not so obvious...)

Yes, I have planned to become a carpenter or some other profession many times.

But, I have been blessed/lucky to be a one man show for many years and I had to stick with one tech stack and my learning only added not shifted out from under me. So when I made massive changes it was on my own terms.

The cost is mentally going against the trends/grain in the industry. My LAMP stack is now back in style, and I am grateful I never dumped it for something trendy.

Choosing treatment is a very personal thing. My father chose to stop his chemo treatments and it improved his standard of living dramatically. (he's still fighting cancer) A friend of mine (a nurse) said she'd never torture her self like she's seen so many people do with some treatments. (She died of cancer a few years ago)

Sometimes other's people's advice isn't based on what is best for you, but on an aggregate across many people, and you could be on the bad side of percentages.

I would also add that many people are not used to asking for help like this, and he may need to really encourage his mother to get requests out of her.

It took a long time for my father to ask for help, and I could have been helping sooner.