This + some other quirks are what have kept me off KDE for a good while. I understand wanting to do things differently, possibly easier – but it’s hard to break old habits.

I’ll carry the odd opinion here and say there’s actually a way this could be useful. You have to add value to a product to make it worth your time and effort, increase adoption, and make it at least self-sustainable. Find reasons to justify why this should exist. For a start - This could save time on projects where similar data has to be loaded on a page from multiple api endpoints but it doesn’t match. - an old example, but one that I fought once - looking up the time zone of a city from one api, then the time offset from UTC from another api, and trying to relate it all together. That meant my functions had to match that data up on the client side because there were imperfect text matches.

As a second example, if you were able to cache or keep record of data from upstream endpoints that often takes a while to gather because they can’t/won’t, you might offer a performance advantage or datasets which were previously unavailable to a user without monitoring data coming from that API over an extended period of time.

There’s more you can do, but that hinges again on what I previously said, find your pitch and solve problems that the others have created and won’t fix.

Most new projects / experiments would run under a directory for a testing subdomain that was already established for the sake of saving the most time. I once asked for and was granted access to our company’s DNS server and outside provider for setting these up if needed. Otherwise it was editing the local hosts file on my machine or doing that for a different user for collaboration purposes. Looking back, I probably could have scripted these host file edits but didn’t need to this very often.

I started my first web development job a bit later in life than most but attended university rather than being self-taught. When I began working, I had to self teach because the languages I was working with were not much of what I’d learned in school. A few years later we revamped the product and I had to go learn a different stack so again, self-learning on the fly in order to maintain what we had going. I stayed at that place for about 9 years and felt like I was stagnating, plus I was siloed off into my own realm and had no help to rely on aside from what I could find in books or online. I deeply felt I needed mentorship, not from a coding perspective but to catch up with the industry & create a clear career path for the future.

I did eventually receive mentorship through a consultant to work through the next phase. We determined the causes of what I was feeling, coached on some new skills, and I found myself running my own business a few years later to realize a dream which hadn’t been fulfilled. Now, several years have passed since that point - during the last year I was forced to dissolve that business because I had to step back to focus on my health instead of continue grinding and growing for my and my family’s sake. During that time, I turned to a few trusted contacts for advice and mentorship. The perspective from the outside helped me get through that process and pick up and carry on to the next thing when I felt like a failure.

I share these anecdotes to show examples that there is tremendous value to you to find networking, gather contacts, and turn to people for mentorship and advice wherever you can get it. One thing I learned is that it doesn’t matter as much what the hot new framework is or what hosting infrastructure solution the companies are moving to - those things are always going to be caught up in a constant churn cycle. The news sites and communities are going get caught up in hype but it matters more what can be created from the hype than the hype itself. Businesses care most about what keeps their sites cost-efficient, highly available, performing well, and secure day in and day out so they can keep their doors open and the lights on. You will find tools to help you accomplish this and pick up this knowledge through learning from others as you go. Don’t just seek out web-related mentorship either. Talk with people in other fields no matter what they may do, you will find knowledge which you can bring back and apply to our field.

I’m reminded of a time I found myself using an open source tool on github and finding it severely out of date on sources of information it was using to operate. I made a fork, spent a few hours updating, committed that code and put in a pull request with the original developer so they could merge it back into their original. 5 Years later, no response. 🤣

People abandon projects for various reasons or only work with the scarce free time they have. You may find someone interested in a healthy competition, but it might be more likely they back off when they see someone pick up the torch and do what they no longer can.

I may be starting a gig soon where I’ll be tasked with creating a knowledge base, this might be just the ticket. Thanks for sharing!

Bought my daughter a lenovo chromebook duet. It is a pretty neat little machine with a detachable keyboard / form factor like a surface tablet. I have not figured out if linux is an option on it yet but I do know there are people out there who have gotten linux running on chromebook hardware.