Meredith Matthews @braindouche@qoto.org

Backend developers are funny sometimes. I was talking last night with a guy on the other team. He kept insisting "this is a complex system, there are MILLIONS of entries in that db!" and he couldn't quite understand that I only care about looking at one at a time, or batches of 30 for the paginated list view, at most.

I'm not arguing that the backend isn't muscular and incredibly complex, because it is and as far as I'm concerned he's a wizard for making all that data dance efficiently. But I am front end, and all that is a black box behind an API to me and I like it that way.

Perspective will get you every time.

(Tbf he also thinks tables are incomprehensibly hard to write, so he is also kinda biased but still.)

So what can we conclude about react here?

Oh ES6 modules at runtime, why have I waited so long to embrace you?

It makes me sad that most people don't remember lonelygirl15 and what it represents, especially young fans of the now established unfiction genre. But those kids are going to keep making stuff, and masterpieces will come out over the next ten years and that is so exciting.

I swear, one guy on my team thinks front end just eats avocado toast and writes bad JavaScript all day just as a personal insult to him.

When dealing with one-man-shop vendors in inexpensive html products, how long should I wait for him to get back to my support request before putting him on blast in public?

Hey web nerds, does anyone have a suggestion for a wysiwyg website tool that's cheap or free? I want to make some deranged content pretty quickly and I need the right tool to do a bad job. Thanks!

Look, don't tell me browser performance is meaningless. I optimized just the home page of one large site for one large company and it was in such poor shape, the electricity bill went down. How far down? I forget the number, but it had roughly twice the carbon footprint as my car did driving me to work every day.

Something I think about a lot is making technology my mother could use. My mom is actually quite technically competent, and not afraid of breaking stuff or screwing things up. Her problem instead is that she's deeply impatient with bad design. She gets along poorly with phones and apps and honestly, I can't blame her in the slightest, phones are saturated in bad interfaces.

I should be more like that. It would make me a better developer.

It never ceases to amaze me how many podcasts don't sound like am talk radio, or NPR (either the old stuff or the new stuff), or sports talk, they sound like Howard Stern. Is this on purpose? I mean I understand *technically* why, but was that the plan here? We had a whole new medium to play with and this is what we did?

You know, part of me wants to set up a full indieweb site to publish all my crap on, and run my own email server, set up a mastodon node, and really reorganize all the junk I've spread over the internet over the years.

And then I think that's going to involve a lot of work and ongoing maintenance and then not do that.

Does anyone know who owns isthestockmarketgoingtocrash.com? Because it crashed.

I really should do a #introduction: hello! My name is Meredith. My handle comes from a book called The Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road ("road tripping is the ultimate brain douche...") which I translated into personal branding for a bunch of blogging and podcasting in the early two-thousandsies and stuck. For what its worth, it's a consistently unclaimed name and I'm shameless enough to use it.

Professionally I'm a #frontend dev, or as I prefer to say, a stunningly average mid-career pixel programmer, and I think it's time for a promotion because right now the funnest thing I do is make feature prototypes. I try to promote #boringtech, #accessibility and #browserperformance, and at this point I'm just anti-react. If you want someone to come delete your code, hit me up!

Personally, I love #beer, #fountainpens and currently I'm falling in love with #videogames all over again thanks to my #SteamDeck , which I consider to be the best piece of hardware I've ever bought. #factorio #soulsborne #soulcalibur are my forever games.

I'm a lesbian, I'm thoroughly gaymarried, I live in Buffalo by choice, TERFs get fucked, trans liberation now, black lives matter, go unions, social democrat (yes I'd like a welfare state please), atheist, and I haven't hashtagged any of that because I don't particularly want to talk about any of it.

Me, in a meeting just now: "look, mister designer, I understand you want to do a good job and make a good design to present, but have you considered the benefits of coming over with me to the darkside and engaging in psychological warfare with our stakeholders instead?"

Hey nerds, have any war stories of a project that refused to give you requirements? How did you deal with that?

Does anyone else wonder if you're doing discord wrong?

I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the right job. I'm at the right level, I'm leading a team, mentoring juniors, cross-discipline collaborating, prototyping and making front-end tech stack decisions and that part is pretty great.

What I am doing: creating simple, robust interfaces with fairly minimal technologies, using 11ty, sass and sprinkling in js conservatively for everyone's benefit, and building an approach that will make changes in the future as trivial as possible. I'm building web apps that will be handed off to java devs who's web skills are a decade out of date and making it as hard as I can for them to fail.

What I'm *not* doing: dealing with browser performance, enhancing accessibility, writing fire-breathing CSS and diaphanous JS, demonstrating that progressive enhancement is a powerful tool at scale and using boring tools to get there. I love this stuff but my job simply doesn't need it.

I'm finding greenfield development kind of boring? I like coming up with wacky solutions to hard problems. I like refactoring and redesigning and fixing things and solving problems.

If I can't figure out how to engineer my own job into the direction I want, I have absolutely no idea how to go and find the position that shares my priorities, and I've been getting programmer jobs for 16 years now. I suspect I'm looking in the wrong place and my next job title will not be Lead Front End Dev, but I can't imagine what it might be.

What do you think, fediverse?

Does anyone know why tiny desktop computers (I hesitate to call them mini computers because I'm that nerd) are all over the algorithms lately? Everyone wants to sell me one claiming they're good for everything and, I guess that's fine? But why is this a thing now?

Ok, so I noticed the instance I actually want to be a part of is sorta allowing new members but if I'm going to make that happen, I'm going to have to engage and add value and demonstrate that I am a good nerd who can bring wisdom and interesting growth to those around me. Here goes:

Hi! I'm Meredith and I'm single-handedly responsible for major telcos all over the world running hardware deployment big data "apps" that are in fact static html pages and I'm not sorry.

Hey, anyone got any advice on how to transition from a very experienced, spoiled developer to a stupidly overpaid consultant? Asking for me.