I've been left behind and I'm embarrassed to ask for help

[iHorseHead]

Hello!
I know PHP, which I started to already learn when I was a teenager and back then I found web development a lot easier. I'm not kidding. You made a website and uploaded it through FTP and boom, it was done.
All of the databases were in PHPMyadmin, easy to manage, easy to see what's happening and the best of all, I knew the cost. Back in 2007 I used to pay 5€ / month for web-hosting, but nowadays everybody talks about Firebase etc and I am afraid to try those things out, because of the pricing. There really doesn't seem to be a fixed cost?
I mean what is the cost of $0,00595/h.
Then there are stories like:
I am charged ~$60K on AWS, without using anything I've read the same things about Firebase etc and second of all, I've bought courses on Udemy on React etc development and to my disappointment none of those show how to upload a website either.

Why would I even need a VPS hosting? Why are people using different frameworks on their website? I mean why would anyone create their portfolio on Django and other frameworks when it looks like something you could just do in HTML? And why is there so much hate towards PHP? I mean in my opinion it's fine. There are amazing websites that use PHP and they're not slow or bad in any way. How does the pricing even work on Firebase? Why's every authentication system on iOS tutorials using Firebase, MongoDB or something like that? Let's look at the pricing of MongoDB. For example it says:
from $0.10/million reads. What does that even mean?
Honestly, where can I learn this stuff from scratch? Currently, I've been slowly creating a ticketing system in PHP, but every time I've asked for help from somewhere I get so much hate for using PHP and 'outdated' technology, which isn't secure?
There's like nowhere to ask for help either. I don't even understand why one would need VPS hosting etc?

There are so many new frameworks out there that I don't know what to learn. Back when I used to do web development for fun there was HTML,CSS,PHP and Flash.
Also, why does every website look the same nowadays? I know a lot of people hate Flash, but Flash and Actionscript was easy and awesome. I still remember how awesome Fort Minor's website and The Simpsons Movie's websites were back in the day and Rockstar Games had so many awesome sites in flash. Nowadays everything is about "minimalism" and everything else sucks. Why is it that way? I mean the only impressive website that I found from today is https://activetheory.net/. It reminds me the good old Flash days. Anyways, I'm feeling so left behind.

I don't understand how pricing works, I don't understand why people use frameworks for simple websites that I could throw together in HTML, I don't really understand anything anymore and there are so many frameworks out there for seemingly simple websites. So, where should I start? I know PHP and I think it's a comfortable language. Everything I've created in my localhost works so far. I'm not in a hurry with creating a website as creating an app and learning Swift is my main priority.

 

[rich06]

People who hate on PHP have probably not used it since the v5.x days and so have missed the major changes and improvements that have been made to the language since then... or they just have an axe to grind! Sorry that you get hate for asking questions about PHP on support forums. You could try the PHP sub-reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/ in future maybe

FWIW Javascript gets a lot of hate too - probably more than PHP!

 

[chrono1081]

I hope you get responses because I'm curious too. Web development is downright disgusting these days. I (a mobile developer) remember being forced to write a web app at my previous job in 2015 due to one of the devs being out on disability (my only previous experience in web was Geocities back in the 90s).

I was shocked to find the smattering of...**** you had to use to just get a simple small web app up. I had to learn ASP.net, C#, and a helper syntax called Razor (why is there a helper syntax vs a fix of the regular syntax?)

Then came the main front end code. I had everything working just fine in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS but nope that wasn't good enough for the one senior dev even though it met all the requirements just fine. He took it over, ripped out my working code and jammed in Zurb Foundation, jQuery (which I will always hate and refuse to use), SASS (which is apparently some kind of helper language for CSS) and some other junk.

His page looked almost the same, ran 20x slower (literally), and didn't scale as nicely to small screens as mine did and got super janky if used on a tablet and you rotated the tablet (mine was fine). I left the job because I wasn't about to get shoehorned into another web application.

 

[VitoBotta]

I work as a bug bounty hunter in my free time and I am happy that PHP exists because a big chunk of the vulnerabilities I discover are on PHP apps 😀

 

[avro707]

Then came the main front end code. I had everything working just fine in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS but nope that wasn't good enough for the one senior dev even though it met all the requirements just fine. He took it over, ripped out my working code and jammed in Zurb Foundation, jQuery (which I will always hate and refuse to use), SASS (which is apparently some kind of helper language for CSS) and some other junk.

I understand your pain there, I've seen the results of certain technical foundations being used where it was not necessary and actually not the cleanest solution, but someone had to have it that way then later on it comes unstuck and people have to spend lots of time going through a changing things then all the testing to make sure the changes don't break things (and inevitable reworking needed). That's takes time.

All our stuff is Java based on a massive scale.

 

[9valkyrie]

I don't know where you're at right now, but I'd recommend MDN as a starting point. Find a good IDE (I use Code). I've written a web app framework, but I don't use any other frameworks. I don't use my framework for basic things that it could do without. There's the delicate balance of needs there. I just keep it simple, and when/if I start needing the framework I'll import it. The Stack Exchange Network (e.g. Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, etc.) also may hold some crucial pieces of information. If you are considering PHP, they have a website for lookups. As a full-stack web app developer, I like things to be simple and clean. I use the basics HTML/JS/CSS/SVG/PHP/SQL. I hope this addressed one or more questions?

 

[MisterSavage]

I am charged ~$60K on AWS, without using anything I've read the same things about Firebase etc and second of all, I've bought courses on Udemy on React etc development and to my disappointment none of those show how to upload a website either.

Why would I even need a VPS hosting? Why are people using different frameworks on their website? I mean why would anyone create their portfolio on Django and other frameworks when it looks like something you could just do in HTML?

Honestly that sounds like something you wouldn't have to worry about with hosting a website with AWS. Sounds like he let a process go wild. You wouldn't be doing that setting up a website. I found it very painful to set up a static website with AWS but the cost savings has been worth it. It was drastically cheaper to renew my domain name and I'm paying something laughable ($2?) a month.

I'm not in a hurry with creating a website as creating an app and learning Swift is my main priority.

Creating a website for an app is a "nice to have" but absolutely not a requirement. You could host your privacy policy on something such as GitHub and point to it.

Making apps is fun. I recommend the 100 Days of SwiftUI.

 

[splifingate]

a big chunk of the vulnerabilities I discover are on PHP apps

Thank you for helping to make PHP better

 

[splifingate]

There really doesn't seem to be a fixed cost?

Of course.

I do personal PHP/HTML/CSS/js dev on a USD6/mo host, with "99.9xyz" uptime, and fluent availability.

I could provision for more, but there's no real need.

Learning and 'applicating' doesn't require you to sell a kidney

 

[Boyd01]

Although I dabbled in web development over the years, I didn't get serious about building my own web app until 2019 at the age of 70. Am just doing this for myself, so no need to worry about what's popular or what skills would make me marketable. Working with javascript/css/html to build a mapping/gps web app which is currently about 16,000 lines of hand-written code with almost 3tb of locally-hosted content.

Actually using the same little hosting company that I began with over 20 years ago! They're nothing all that special but stuck with them because they've treated me well and I'd rather avoid the Amazons of the world. Did consider moving to AWS but was too confused by their policy which (evidently) depends on how much data is transferred. Pretty sure they couldn't match the price I negotiated with my little hosting company anyway.

PHP doesn't interest me, but it's certainly popular with hackers. My log files are full of endless probes. Just wasting their time, they won't find anything like this on my site. Here's a small fraction of probes from yesterday.

 

[MBAir2010]

Sorry to interrupt, can a person, human...design a website on Dreamweaver CS4
with features like image roll overs, html backgrounds, multi text w/out css and tables, TR etc
and host that some where in 2024?
the code is basic HTML and the website is fun, interactive and not optomised for "teh googles".

I designed real actually websites for a company from 2007 to 2018 with several hiatus due to location reasons.

thanks in advance!

 

[jedimasterkyle]

When I went back to school in 2010, I entered a Web Dev program and I thought the future was so very bright. I had taken HTML courses in high school and really enjoyed it so going into college, I figured I would pick up right where I left off.

By the time I graduated in 2017, with TWO degrees in Web Dev, knowing HTML was more of a hobby than an actual skill. The entire industry had shifted to CMS platforms like WordPress, SaaS, Ruby, Python and a whole smattering of others. Trying to land an ENTRY LEVEL job after graduation went a little something like this:

MUST KNOW:

• jQuery, Javascript, PHP, CMS and other various frameworks
• 5+ years of SEO optimization
• 5+ years of SQL development and administration
• Proficient in Adobe CS
• Proficient in ASP.net
• HTML/CSS knowledge is preferred but not required

Almost overnight, my dream of becoming a Web Developer disintegrated because everything I had learned in school was suddenly a decade behind the curve. Not only that but jobs that were looking for Web Devs were basically asking for full stack developers for minimum wage.

I'll never forget sitting in an interview where my knowledge and experience fit perfectly with the company but the person interviewing me said this:

"Honestly, your resume and degrees are outstanding but we can't hire you because you're going to cost too much money. We're looking for someone right out of high school and, ideally, would prefer someone who is still IN high school because they're cheaper and know more of the modern technologies."

To say I was INFURIATED was an understatement.

So in my opinion, being a web developer these days is a lost cause because the expectation of being a cheap full-stack developer is just not feasible or realistic but that's what companies want these days.

 

[mattspace]

Sorry to interrupt, can a person, human...design a website on Dreamweaver CS4
with features like image roll overs, html backgrounds, multi text w/out css and tables, TR etc
and host that some where in 2024?
the code is basic HTML and the website is fun, interactive and not optomised for "teh googles".

I designed real actually websites for a company from 2007 to 2018 with several hiatus due to location reasons.

thanks in advance!

I've been hand-coding html since around... 1995-ish, and If you want to build static websites right now is pretty much the best it has ever been.

HTML has recovered from the morass of xhtml and has become cleaner to look at, the structural best practices and semantic norms have become clearer, and CSS flexbox is literally the best thing ever to happen to web design.

We're finally back in a place where we can horizontally and vertically centre content of indeterminate height on a page, in a way that is more compact than a 100% width and height table with a single cell centre & middle aligned.

That said, I haven't used Dreamweaver since ~CS5 (and that wasn't as good as GoLive), what is really missing for static HTML developers is WYSIWYG tools that handle mass link repointing when source files are moved / renamed etc.

 

[avro707]

and CSS flexbox is literally the best thing ever to happen to web design.

I love flexbox, so simple.

I also like using LESS.

I used to use Dreamweaver for search and replace/remove in code when I’m trying to adapt information copied from a list to use elsewhere (such as in a spreadsheet) but generally not for designing anything. I just manually code.

These days you’ve also got to know so many other things, code repos, GitHub, etc, pipelines for instance. The application I use is heavily Java reliant so it helps to know that, although you can try to go headless.

 

[mattspace]

I love flexbox, so simple.

The latest piece of webdev stuff I've done - a many year off / on again attempt to rebuild a new from-scratch responsive Wordpress theme, that pares back a lot of the external libraries, functions, nested templates pieces etc, and makes everything comprehensible.

What was delightful this time round (apart from flexbox) was things like being able to use math operators in CSS values, and conditional logic for targeting CSS selectors.

Genuinely fun stuff.

These days you’ve also got to know so many other things, code repos, GitHub, etc, pipelines for instance. The application I use is heavily Java reliant so it helps to know that, although you can try to go headless.

I've not bothered with any of that - though I am starting to work my way from first principles through Swift Playgrounds, and learning how things I've hacked on for years (eg functions) actually work from a theoretical perspective - I've never seriously attempted to learn programming, because it was always really dry and required using a browser as the deployment environment, which never hooked up for me intellectually.