Start a post about the basics of web development.

posts/more-about-javascript.md

@@ -1,6 +1,8 @@
 ---
 title: Thoughts on JavaScript
-description: Describing the architecture of Handlers, Services, (Domains), and Presentation
+description: |>
+    Describing the architecture of Handlers, Services, (Domains), and
+    Presentation
 date: 2024-08-11
 tags:
   - development
@@ -12,16 +14,35 @@ draft: true
 
 ## My History With JavaScript
 
-I think the first time I wrote JavaScript and got paid for it, I was young, dumb, and willing to work at a design agency for nearly minimum wage making WordPress templates and CakePHP applications. The team I worked with had adopted jQuery for all things front-end - which was the style at the time. I think this time was about 2014.
+I think the first time I wrote JavaScript and got paid for it, I was young,
+dumb, and willing to work at a design agency for nearly minimum wage making
+WordPress templates and CakePHP applications. The team I worked with had
+adopted jQuery for all things front-end - _which was the style at the time_. I
+think this time was about 2014.
 
-From there, I moved on to other Agency jobs and finally ended up at my current place of employment as a lowly _PHP Developer_. This role was designed to solely work on a single Magento 1 codebase. Again, jQuery was the tool of choice. Of course the JavaScript landscape was changing rapidly with the introductions of Node.js, and frameworks like Angular and React. I paid no mind to these since the bulk of my work was still in the world of Magento 1 and working on a plan to migrate to Magento 2.
+From there, I moved on to other agency jobs and finally ended up at my current
+place of employment as a lowly _PHP Developer_. This role was designed to
+solely work on a single Magento 1 codebase. Again, jQuery was the tool of
+choice. Of course the JavaScript landscape was changing rapidly with the
+introductions of Node.js, and frameworks like Angular and React. I paid no
+mind to these since the bulk of my work was still in the world of Magento 1
+and working on a plan to migrate to Magento 2.
 
-It wouldn't be until 2018 (or maybe 2019?) that I would write a line of JavaScript for Node.js. We had decided to go all-in on AWS Lambda. I worked on a service that would push order data out of our Magento instance into our Production Facility's database. Let's call this _The Bridge_. This Lambda was invoked by API Gateway. This was a very small web service, essentially. This was, also, my first experience with _Callback Hell_. There was no `await` and no real `Promise` API (except, _I think_ Bluebird, but I never knew about it at the time) yet. The service actually needed to do a lot of queries, and use those results for other queries, so on, and so forth. If you're familiar with working on Callback Hell you will recognize this:
+It wouldn't be until 2018 (or maybe 2019?) that I would write a line of
+JavaScript for Node.js. We had decided to go all-in on AWS Lambda. I worked on
+a service that would push order data out of our Magento instance into our
+Production Facility's database. Let's call this _The Bridge_. This Lambda was
+invoked by API Gateway. This was a very small web service, essentially. This
+was, also, my first experience with _Callback Hell_. There was no `await` and
+no real `Promise` API (except, _I think_ Bluebird, but I never knew about it
+at the time) yet. The service actually needed to do a lot of queries, and use
+those results for other queries, so on, and so forth. If you're familiar with 
+working on Callback Hell you will recognize this:
 
 ```javascript
 var mysql = require("mysql");
 
-var config = {...};
+var config = { ... };
 
 mysql.connect(config, function (err, conn) {
     // handle the error
@@ -50,15 +71,28 @@ mysql.connect(config, function (err, conn) {
     });
 });
 ```
+
 _This sucks._
 
-We ended up rewriting this service in C# as that was the most popular language within the organization at the time. Honestly, thank god. I didn't need to write or maintain the service once it fell into the hands of the .NET team.
+We ended up rewriting this service in C# as that was the most popular language
+within the organization at the time. Honestly, thank god. I didn't need to
+write or maintain the service once it fell into the hands of the .NET team.
 
 ## How I Approached Big Applications
 
-Eventually all the .NET guys left the company. My boss left the company. I was put in charge and the first thing I did was deploy an Express.js application to completely rewrite the service discussed above. I did this because this was actually faster to do than figure out how the build system (Jenkins, Ansible, and TeamCity _I think_) and deploy it to our common pattern architecture. It was also a way for me to prove to my new boss that I can get things done and that moving to slowly remove our reliance on .NET and IIS for our services was a worthy endeavor.
+Eventually all the .NET guys left the company. My boss left the company. I was
+put in charge and the first thing I did was deploy an Express.js application to
+completely rewrite the service discussed above. I did this because this was
+actually faster to do than figure out how the build system (Jenkins, Ansible,
+and TeamCity _I think_) and deploy it to our common pattern architecture. It
+was also a way for me to prove to my new boss that I can get things done and
+that moving to slowly remove our reliance on .NET and IIS for our services was
+a worthy endeavor.
 
-A lot of my experience up until that point was mostly working in Magento 2, which is a massive, Enterprisey, PHP application. Modern PHP tends look more and more like C# or Java as the years go on. So that's where my mind is - poisoned by web MVC and Enterprise OOP (_tm_).
+A lot of my experience up until that point was mostly working in Magento 2,
+which is a massive, Enterprisey, PHP application. Modern PHP tends look more
+and more like C# or Java as the years go on. So that's where my mind is -
+poisoned by web MVC and Enterprise OOP (_tm_).
 
 
 

posts/the-basics-of-web-dev.md

@@ -0,0 +1,96 @@
+---
+title: The Absolute Basics on Web Development 
+description: A post en which I talk about the basics of web development.
+date: 2024-11-18
+tags:
+  - development
+  - html
+  - css
+  - javascript
+slug: the-basics-of-web-development
+draft: true
+---
+
+## The Server & Client
+
+At the time of this posting, I have already conducted a workshop at a Hackathon
+for High School students in my city. My workshop took the kids from nothing to
+a very basic HTML document published on to the internet. I ended up using
+Github Codespaces, and Github Pages to get them from 0 to Web Page with the
+least amount of friction. Those technologies aside, this whole endeaver
+inspired me to write down what I think are the absolute basics, as I understand
+them from my own experience as a professional web developer.
+
+The first thing to truly understand is the relationsihp between a Server and
+the Client. The Server is a piece of software that reacts to requests from a
+Client. The Client is you - probably using a web browser like Firefox or
+Chrome.
+
+I think its important to talk about TCP/IP, the packet, and the structure of
+the Request and Response data.
+
+## The Document
+
+The best way to conceptualize what a web page is, is to look at what it
+actually is - a document. The Document is made up of a special Markup language
+called Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). This is a form of Hypermedia - a
+concept we don't have to fully invest in yet.
+
+HTML describes structure and classification of data. There are three main
+parts of an HTML document:
+
+1. The Document Type
+2. The Header
+3. The Body
+
+The Document Type simply states "Hey, this document is of this format." We wont
+go into the history of the HTML Document Type tag since once HTML was
+standardized we perfected the notion of how to declare a document type.
+
+If you're curious about the history of this line and what it used to look like,
+feel free to look at [the Wikipedia article on the subject](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_type_declaration).
+
+The Header is _meta data about the document_. This is where things like the
+Title of the document is declared, where character set in the document is
+defined, and other things like injecting remote files like stylesheets and
+JavaScript.
+
+The Body is where the content for the document actually lives. This is where we
+will write a majority of our HTML and present the information we want to share
+with the world.
+
+Let's take a look at the document we are going to craft. By the end of this
+blog, if you wish to follow along, you will have a very basic understanding of
+how the web works.
+
+```html
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+    <head>
+        <title>A simple web page.</title>
+    </head>
+    <body>
+        <!-- This is a comment, this is not rendered to the page. -->
+        <h1>Level 1 Header</h1>
+        <p>This is a paragraph that will live on the page.</p>
+        <p>This paragraph has a <a href="https://tildes.net">Link to Tildes</a> on it!</p>
+    </body>
+</html>
+```
+
+## The Stylesheet
+
+Styling HTML is usually done through a language called Cascading Style Sheets.
+This language allows you to define things like font families, sizes, colours,
+and even placement on the document itself. CSS has gone through a huge
+evolution since I first learned it in 2004(ish). While I am no designer (that's
+my wife), I have learned some really basic skills over the years that allow me
+to get a basic, legible, site styled. Case and point: this blog.
+
+## Interactivity
+
+The only real way to add interactivity to an HTML document these days is to add
+some JavaScript. JavaScript is a temultuous topic in and of itself but I think
+understanding the basics, especially within the context of a Web Browser and
+on an HTML document, can help you appreciate what a little of client-side code
+can do to improve the experience of reading some documents.