women + hackers = awesome

[kaigou]

There's a joke in this house about Scorpios (of which I am not one), but it'd take like a paragraph and a half to give backstory. Instead I'll just say that walking into a women-developer's meetup was one of the most awesome experiences I've had in months. Granted, as mostly a front-end person, I was sitting in the category of lightweight compared to the Java and Python women I met, but still. No one dissed me for being web-focused. The one time someone made (very slight) fun of me and one other person using PHP, all I had to do was point out that we could be using dot-net instead, and suddenly PHP wasn't the worst choice.

Still, I know there are plenty of issues with PHP, but it's not something I'd say I program in, per se. I use it per its original intention (pre-processing) and rarely do any kind of major work with it. I think the only time I've even bothered with instantiating classes was in writing WP plugins, and let's not even get into how kludgey WP really is. Which means most of the issues with PHP just aren't a concern to me. I use it functionally (as opposed to OOP) to do what I want, to talk to the sql db, and I haven't had need or interest in doing more.

Jquery, on the other hand... hunh, once you start writing functions, it's like the damn rabbithole. It's worse than the shortcut-functions I write for PHP, which I do solely so I can save time on the front end. (Easier by far to write get_story_name($id) or even multi_select_box($table, $group) than writing it out over and over.) Now that I've finally figured out (this) and how to make a var of (this) name (not just value), I have turned into a function-writing fool. I feel like I need to practice my maniacal laugh.

Comments

[brainwane]

Yay, glad you had a good time!

And MediaWiki is built in PHP and people can just shut the hell up, because it's not like Wikipedia doesn't scale. :-)

[kaigou]

My understanding is that one major plus for PHP is that it does scale, and quite powerfully. A lot's built on it, but there's no way around the fact that it's got a lot of cobbling going on in there. I mean, the naming inconsistency is the least of it, like strtolower versus n2br or whatever it is, or that half the array functions are array_something and the other half are arraysomething, and I can never remember which. But hey, whatever. It works.

Yes, very good time. Not sure I'm up for doing the annual bash, but I'll definitely be doing the monthly get-together. I think they're moving to a social get-together at least half the time, which is preferable for me. When my laptop died (mac, anyway), I opted for a second large screen over replacing the laptop. Kind of puts me out of the picture when it comes ot events where the invite explicitly states, "and bring your laptop". Sure, but it's DEAD. We can use it as an oversized coaster!

[owl]

Javascript toolkits are AWESOME. When I think back to implementing my own drawer widgets......web dev is so much more fun these days (but IE still sucks :) )

[kaigou]

I had the strangest experience with IE recently, in the big app I just released. IE7 and IE8? Tested thoroughly and work just fine. IE9 won't even let you get past the first page of the form. It's crazy. All the other browsers work -- including the bastard child, IE7! -- but not IE9. The QA tester told me that IE9 even throws fits with Amazon, so I shouldn't feel bad that I had to put a note at the front of the app that if you're using IE9 to switch to Chrome or Firefox.

I still have no idea why IE9 chokes. None of the other browsers tested do the same. Annoying. But then again, not a major stress, since I also mucked up on the error-testing and completely forgot to tie the form's error-checking to the page's error-checking. DOH. (Which means the first round of error checking says, "not a valid entry" but if you don't fix it, the second round to advance pages says, "all fields are full, let's go!" and the invalid entries end up being entered because OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE I DID NOT NOTICE THAT.)

There's a reason major apps are usually developed by two or more developers. One person alone just misses this stuff. That could just be me, but let's let me continue to live with this delusion. It's nice in this reality right now.