Greetings from the 20th Century


#1

Hi, my name is Joe and it’s been 23 years since my first web site. Up to now, I’ve used vi as my development environment, and CGI scripts in C and Perl for dynamic content. The old-school system works fine, but one day I noticed that I had no idea what real web developers were talking about. I bought Tracy’s book and started working through it to try and catch up. New things to me: Python, Git, Django, which means I’ll be exploring the stranger reaches of error-space.

Here’s where this kind of time-travel gets disturbing: It kind of bothers me, not controlling everything. To build a web site this way, I have to trust a huge invisible army of programmers, all of whom are constantly warning me that their software is insecure and needs to be updated. Even though I started working my way through HWA within a week of the publication of the e-book, the software I’m learning has changed. So what have I really learned? (Well, I’ve learned that “from django.urls import path” works better than “from django.conf.urls import path”.)

However, this is a pretty high level of complaint from someone who’s still just a week into grasping that white space can be mis-formatted. Kudos to Tracy for writing a book so clear that I can blaze through it so easily!


#2

Ha. I understand. Isn’t new technology fun? :P