diablo1

I'm an oldskool dev who shys away from 'the new shiny' because I've learned the basics of JS and you can get pretty far with the fundamentals, despite the allure of these rather expressive frameworks that get released every week now.

Frankly I get more joy out of writing bookmarklets, Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey scripts and customizing websites with various CSS 'userstyles'.

I also prefer SFTP and still enjoy uploading PHP scripts with SFTP and then building out some barebones CRUD app in my free time. Again, I shy away from the new shiny like GraphQL and things like Docker or Kubernetes etc.

> And didn't have any or much experience with old school HTML

A good heuristic for how good a web developer is is getting them to list every HTML element they know, including the deprecated ones like <marquee>. You would be surprised just how little elements they know, and more importantly, the semantic value of the elements. For example, knowing when to use <span> instead of <div>

The JS API is a bit safer as the user has to "explicitly enable this feature". Although in some browsers, full access is granted. Thanks for pointing it out. Another reason to surf with JS disabled and whitelist for sites that require it.

I am somewhat of a polymath, but a narrowly focused one, in that most of my skills solely apply to computers, and very little else. But then you may ask: computers are a broad topic: how does one ever conquer the subject and attain mastery of it?

My answer is simple: the world of computers is an endless one, a gigantic rabbit-hole (especially when combined with The Internet). Being able to download source code for a broad number of programs and have them run and configured any way you wish is still magical, no matter how many times I've tried it.

Then there's the fact that you can get reliable information on an endless amount of subjects with very little friction or red tape. I am still in awe of The Internet and haven't become jaded about it yet, as many of my peers have (they literally have grown bored of the net...something I can't understand). I guess it's how you apply the knowledge instead of merely knowing for the sake of knowing.

Thank goodness. Google is the biggest potential 'database of ruin' that could embarrass many people if even a sliver of the dossiers they have on people were leaked. Holding onto this database (without periodically wiping it) is like keeping tonnes of radioactive waste under the floorboards.

I have made a habit of mining HN's Algolia search engine. You can uncover some real gems if you just put in the effort to narrow down your search to the particular topic you're interested in. Also: to avoid bias I wrote a script that opens random stories from the HN main page in my browser tabs, and am often surprised and refreshed by what I read (As most stories that gain popularity on the main page have vague titles)

PWAs need to be pushed more. PWAs are more private and don't have access to things that could contain sensitive information like the clipboard's contents which are often scraped and uploaded to shady C2s by some apps