[context: sitting in a chair, posting a comment here in devRant]

Other Person (jokingly): "That doesn't look like volunteer work, that looks like texting!"

Me (awkwardly): "Haha, yeah..."

Me (internally): If only I had people to text...

I spent a lot of my time as a little kid playing video games and typing on my old computer. Somehow I found GameMaker (6 or 7, I think) and started pumping out little games with the free version. I didn't like the drag and drop stuff so I learned GML (GameMaker Language).

A few years later someone gave me a PHP book and while I never actually learned anything from it, it did get me interested in learning a real programming language (not GML).

Around this time Minecraft became popular, and with a lot of YouTube videos I got a grasp on Java, and a little C++/C#.

Tinkering around in scripting languages finally lead me to JavaScript which of course introduced me to HTML and CSS.

I loved how quickly a website could me created compared to a compiled program, so I started spending most of my time learning Web Technologies.

And that leads me to where I am today. By this point I've spent over half of my life programing in various languages and formats and I've loved every bit of it!

Why in the world wide web is it so hard to use JavaScript to dynamically create a custom web component element after the page has loaded!? I swear I must be missing something obvious. I know it isn't working because document.currentScript.ownerDocument is null and I use that to get the template and it works great if the elements are on the page already but it fails as soon as I try to use JS to create a new element of that component and I can't figure it out!

I could easily change the pages to be pre-rendered with data and it'd work fine but I plan on building in a service worker to cache the page skeleton and store the elements in IDB.

(This has been just a fun side project for me this week, until now it's turned into a frustrating project I spent most of my night on)

So one day I got an email from a client just before I'm about to go home saying she wanted to update some images on the homepage slider. "No big deal" I thought. So she sends me the images and two of them are squares and the other is a portrait. All of which have phone camera quality and are way too small for the desktop version of the slider. I trim and rearrange the two squares so that fit but the other one was hopeless. I cropped it poorly and hoped she didn't care about it too much.

Of course it was the most important picture she wanted.

I ask the client to send me a higher quality picture which would fit in the slider and she sends me a picture which is even taller and less wide.

"Great," obviously at this point I figure she must be checking on just her cell phone and that's why a tall picture makes more sense to her.

And of course now she needs this before tomorrow morning so now I'm staying late to edit images.

Since she's obviously only looking on her cell phone and she's made me stay so late to do this I just take the tall image and mirror it so that it looks like there are two products side by side and it fits well on mobile screens.

Ugh.

Rule 1) Always use version control.

Rule 2) Never don't use version control.

Master vanilla JavaScript.

Once you do, you'll be able to quickly learn how to use all the frameworks.

And no, jQuery is not vanilla JavaScript.

If you've spent time learning how to code and you're daydreaming about having a dev job but don't have one because you're too nervous to apply, just do it. The worst thing that can happen is that you'll get the job (and be stuck ranting like us).